THE  KINDS  OF  POETRY 


OTHER  BOOKS  BY 

JOHN    ERSKINE 

THE    MORAL    OBLIGATION 
TO     BE     INTELLIGENT 

and  Otheb  Essays 

DEMOCRACY    AND    IDEALS 

GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS 
(With   W.   P.   Trent) 

POETRY 

ACTION  AND  OTHER 
POEMS 

THE  SHADOWED  HOUR 

HEARTS  ENDURING 

A  Play  in  ont  Seen* 


THE 

KINDS  OF  POETRY 

and  Other  Essays 


BY 


JOHN  ERSKINE 

PROFESSOR  OF  ENGLISH, 
COLUMBIA     UNIVERSITY 


NEW  YORK 

DUFFIELD  AND  COMPANY 

1980 


Copyright,  1920,  by 
DUFFIELD  AND  COMPANY 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 


1  N 

n- 


a 

M 


en 

CO 

en 


> 
o 

2: 

To 

RENE  GALLAND 

Ad  unguem 

Factus    homo     .         .         .      n(m     ut    magis     alter     amicus. 

c 

328G03 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The  Kinds  of  Poetry    ......  3 

The  Teaching  of  Poetry 43 

The  New  Poetry 99 

Scholarship  and  Poetry 143 


NOTE 

Of  these  essays,  the  first  appeared  in  the  Jour- 
nal of  Philosophy,  Psychology  and  Scientific 
Methods  for  November  7,  1912;  the  second  ap- 
peared in  the  Columbia  University  Quarterly 
for  December,  1915 ;  the  third  appeared  in  the 
Yale  Review  for  January,  1917.  The  fourth 
essay  is  here  printed  for  the  first  time. 

It  should  be  observed,  perhaps,  that  the  first 
and  second  essays  consider  chiefly  the  reader's 
attitude  toward  poetry,  and  that  the  third  and 
fourth  essays  emphasize  rather  the  writer's  point 
of  view. 

J.  E. 
Columbia  University. 

February,  1920. 


THE  KINDS  OF  POETRY 


THE  KINDS  OF  POETRY 


THE  many  attempts  in  the  last  quar- 
ter-century to  describe  or  define  lit- 
erary genres  have  assumed  in  poetry 
some  such  evolution  as  can  be  demon- 
strated in  geology  or  anatomy.  Literary 
scholarship  has  chiefly  taught  itself  to  see 
in  the  drama  a  development  from  the  re- 
ligious rites  of  Greece  or  of  the  Middle 
Age,  to  hear  in  the  lyric  thin  echoes  of 
Lesbos  or  Provence,  and  to  suspect  be- 
hind these  beginnings,  as  behind  the  Ho- 
meric epic,  lost  tracts  of  primitive  poetry 

[3] 


THE    KINDS    OP    POETRY 

that  reach  to  the  earliest  mutterings  of 
the  race.  To  this  understanding  of  poetry 
and  its  career  the  anthropologists,  beyond 
their  intention,  have  been  most  friendly; 
their  gatherings  of  folk-song  from  races 
or  tribes  all  but  incoherent,  furnish  oblique 
evidence  for  the  scholar's  guess  after  for- 
gotten poetic  origins,  much  as  the  surviv- 
ing monkey  witnesses  to  kindred  aspects 
in  our  parentage.  The  study  of  the  begin- 
nings of  poetry  is  now  usually  supposed 
to  call  for  the  same  kind  of  deduction 
and  induction  from  fossils  and  belated 
survivals  as  the  study  of  the  origin 
of  the  horse.  Is  it  too  presumptuous  to 
suggest  that  in  this  whole  drift  of  literary 
research  there  is  confusion  of  ideas? 

In  the  first  place,  you  cannot  follow 
the  track  of  anything  that  changes  until 
you  have  some  minimum  of  definition  or 
standard  or  guide  to  assure  you  that  from 

[4] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

change  to  change  you  are  still  following 
one  thing,  and  not  discovering  something 
new.  If  this  generalization  is  sweeping, 
at  least  it  can  hardly  be  disputed  by  the 
historians  of  literary  genres,  who  have  all 
in  some  measure  assumed  and  acted  upon 
it.  But  so  far  as  literature  is  concerned 
it  does  not  seem  too  sweeping.  Before 
you  can  inquire  into  the  lowliest  phases 
of  life  you  must  assume,  as  a  scientist, 
what  every  man  instinctively  feels,  that 
life  under  all  its  appearances  is  one  thing. 
To  uncover  the  history  of  any  kind  of 
poetry,  you  must  carry  along  with  you 
an  image,  a  definition,  of  what  you  would 
identify.  Yet  the  lyric,  the  drama,  the 
epic,  are  still  after  much  discussion  unde- 
fined, and  students  of  literature  are  be- 
come so  reconciled  to  the  unscientific  slip- 
periness  of  their  terminology  that  they  ex- 
pect no  one  to  mean  any  specific  thing  by 

[5] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

"lyric"  or  "drama";  they  merely  try  to 
discover,  in  each  use  of  each  term,  the 
user's  idiosyncrasy,  the  unconscious  mark 
of  himself  or  his  breeding.  Or  if  they  feel 
the  need  of  taming  this  chaos,  they  put 
their  hope  in  those  histories  of  genres, 
already  mentioned,  which  are  supposed  to 
describe  if  not  to  define.  Yet  until  there  is 
first  a  definition  of  what  is  eternally  lyri- 
cal, eternally  dramatic,  how  can  we  know 
the  evolution  of  lyric  or  drama? 

Such  a  definition — in  the  second  place — 
is  indispensable  not  merely  to  any  logical 
inquiry  into  evolution,  but  much  more  to 
any  fair  statement  of  what  men  in  general 
think  poetry  is.  In  our  ordinary  thought 
we  conceive  of  poetry  just  as  we  conceive 
of  life  itself,  as  subject  to  no  development 
whatever.  Things  either  have  existed  or 
they  have  not ;  the  utterances  of  the  race, 
similarly,  have  been  either  poetry  or  not 

[6] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

poetry.  It  is  no  contradiction  of  this 
view  that  what  to  one  age  seems  poetic  is 
often  unpoetic  to  the  next;  for  in  every 
such  case  it  is  not  the  poetry  but  the  lan- 
guage, the  medium  of  it,  which  time  has 
rendered  obsolete.  Nor  does  materialistic 
science  present  any  obstacle  to  this  instinc- 
tive selection  of  the  eternal  and  universal 
in  life  and  poetry.  Indeed,  the  more  ma- 
terialistic our  explanation  of  life  and  the 
more  anatomical  our  account  of  poetry, 
the  less  importance  will  the  evolution  of 
either  have  in  comparison  with  its  per- 
manent aspects.  If  consciousness  is  but 
a  fortunate  conjunction  and  behavior  of 
atoms,  how  wonderful  that  the  myriad  dif- 
ferent combinations  of  atoms  should  have 
a  consciousness  in  common  and  should  un- 
derstand each  other.  If  poetry  is  but  an 
accident  of  syllables,  a  fortunate  stirring 
of  connotations,  emotional  and  mental, 

[7] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

how  extraordinary  that  we  should  agree 
that  some  connotations  are  poetic  and  oth- 
ers not.  To  be  sure,  life  and  poetry  do 
appear  in  degree  and  variations;  but  to 
say  quantitatively  that  a  man  is  barely 
alive  or  that  a  piece  is  almost  poetry  does 
not  in  the  least  affect  the  qualitative  dis- 
tinction we  all  make  between  living  and 
dead,  poetic  and  unpoetic. 

Yet,  though  the  evolutionary  historian 
has  not  shared  this  view  of  poetry  as  an 
unchanging  function  of  an  unchanging 
life,  it  will  not  do  to  say,  even  to  imply, 
that  he  has  contributed  nothing  to  our 
knowledge.  He  has  only  failed  to  add  to 
our  knowledge  of  poetry.  He  has  made 
clearer  some  aspect  of  the  form,  the  meter, 
the  imagery — what  in  a  large  sense  we  may 
call  the  language — of  poetry;  and  in  this 
field  his  method  is  practicable,  since  lan- 
guage  does   undergo   evolution,   and  its 

[8] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

relation  to  poetry  is  only  secondary 
though  indispensable,  like  the  relation  of 
the  body  to  life.  To  take  a  ready  illus- 
tration, the  accounts  of  the  development 
of  the  drama  are  for  the  most  part  studies 
of  the  expression  of  drama — studies  of 
language,  in  the  large  sense — of  the  num- 
ber of  actors,  the  shape  of  the  stage,  the 
conditions  of  presentation;  or,  more  sub- 
tly, studies  of  theme,  of  reversals  of  for- 
tune and  combat  with  fate.  In  every  such 
case  the  preliminary  definition  which  de- 
termined the  evolution  was  based  not  on 
the  drama,  but  on  the  expression  of  it,  or 
on  its  subject-matter.  Drama  is  that 
which  can  be  acted,  postulates  one  histor- 
ian, and  then  goes  trailing  the  drama  with 
this  lantern,  though  perhaps  he  would  not 
agree  that  everything  actable  is  dramatic. 
Tragedy,  begins  the  more  subtle  scholar, 
taking  his  cue  from  Aristotle,  is  that  kind 

[9] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

of  drama  which  deals  with  a  tragic  inci- 
dent, a  destructive  or  painful  action,  such 
as  death  or  agony  or  wounds.  Yet  the 
Tale  of  Troy  furnishes  as  apt  subject- 
matter  for  the  lyric  or  the  epic  as  for  the 
drama,  of  which  the  scholar  told  us  trag- 
edy is  a  kind.  And  even  if  he  hedges 
himself  round  with  all  these  postulates  at 
once,  and  says  that  tragedy  deals  with 
such  and  such  subject-matter  and  must  be 
actable,  we  still  can  see  how  the  Tale  of 
Troy  might  be  staged  and  yet  turn  out  to 
be  a  lyric  after  all.  The  scholar  has  sim- 
ply failed  to  put  something  in  his  defini- 
tion that  would  make  certain  the  dramatic 
quality  of  his  tragedy.  Illustrations  from 
other  kinds  of  poetry  are  as  easily  cited. 
He  who  traces  a  literary  genre  like  the 
elegy,  let  us  say,  and  determines  what  is 
an  elegy  by  some  metrical  characteristic, 
is  really  chronicling  the  use  of  that  meter 

[10] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

— just  as  the  scientist  who  would  write 
the  history  of  man  by  showing  the  evolu- 
tion of  his  anatomy,  really  traces  only  the 
history  of  his  anatomy.  That  language, 
the  whole  dress  of  poetry,  is  as  necessary 
to  it  as  the  body  is  to  the  phenomenon  of 
life,  justifies  any  amount  of  study  upon 
it,  but  it  should  not  be  confused  with  the 
study  of  poetry. 

Even  if  poetry  were  subject  to  evolu- 
tion, it  would  be  wise  to  study  it  in  its  lat- 
est development.  The  significance  of  life 
is  not  in  the  lowest  cell,  but  in  the  soul  of 
the  most  spiritual  man;  and  if  we  are  in- 
terested in  defining  the  oak,  why  turn  our 
back  upon  it,  to  draw  conclusions  from  an 
acorn?  But  it  is  time  to  distinguish  be- 
tween language,  which  has  an  evolution- 
ary career,  and  poetry,  which  has  not.  The 
English  tongue  has  evolved  since  Shakes- 
peare's day,  but  poetry  is  just  what  it 

[ii] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

was.  Kill  off  every  horse  in  the  world, 
and  you  destroy  the  species.  Kill  off  every 
known  and  suspected  poet,  and  there  will 
be  as  many  as  ever  after  a  generation  or 
two.  If  the  language  were  destroyed, 
ages  would  be  needed  to  evolve  another; 
but  poetry,  being  a  constant  function  of 
life,  is  rooted  as  it  were  perpendicularly 
in  every  moment  of  consciousness,  and  not 
horizontally,  trailing  back  long  feelers  into 
mist-hidden  swamps  of  primitiveness. 


II 


It  is  the  aim  of  this  paper  to  see  what 
progress  can  be  made  toward  defining 
poetic  genres  by  throwing  overboard  all 
idea  of  evolution  and  considering  poetry 
as  an  invariable  function  of  life.  In  one 
sense,  all  poetry  is  of  one  kind,  and  is  eas- 
ily  described.     Ordinarily   the   emotions 

[12] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

aroused  by  experience  are  used  up  in  the 
further  process  of  living.  The  poet  dif- 
fers from  his  fellows  only  in  the  greater 
power  of  his  emotions,  in  the  greater  im- 
perativeness of  his  intuitions,  whereby  it 
is  easier  for  him  to  express  them  in  words 
than  to  consume  them  in  life.  The  stimu- 
lus that  enters  the  poet's  nature  and  comes 
out  as  epical  or  dramatic  or  lyrical  ex- 
pression, enters  equally  the  nature  of  or- 
dinary man  and  is  consumed  in  lyrical  or 
epic  or  dramatic  living.  However  theo- 
retical or  dogmatic  this  parallel  may  seem, 
in  practice  it  is  recognized  by  all  men.  A 
poet's  temperament  prescribes  into  which 
of  the  three  genres  his  work  shall  fall ;  and 
similarly  the  temperament  of  average  men 
prescribes  whether  they  shall  live  in  the 
present,  or  in  the  past,  or  in  the  future. 
In  these  three  eternal  ways  of  meeting  ex- 
perience, it  is  believed,  are  to  be  found  the 

[13] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

definitions  of  the  lyric,  the  drama,  and  the 
epic.  The  qualities  to  which  we  give  the 
names  "lyrical,"  "dramatic,"  "epic,"  are 
no  less  normal  and  fundamental  than 
these  three  apprehensions  of  life — as  sim- 
ply a  present  moment,  or  as  a  present  mo- 
ment in  which  the  past  is  reaped,  or  as  a 
present  moment  in  which  the  future  is 
promised. 

We  are  accustomed  to  say  that  the  lyric 
expresses  emotion,  with  or  without  an  ad- 
mixture of  intellectual  content;  the  emo- 
tion is  the  essential.  Emotion,  however, 
is  the  nearest  intimation  we  have  of  the 
present  moment.  A  man  may  act,  and 
not  realize  that  he  has  done  so  until  after- 
wards, but  he  cannot  have  an  emotion 
until  he  feels  it.  Yet  vivid  as  is  the  re- 
sponse to  immediate  experience  in  the 
lyric,  it  is  also  as  transitory  as  time  itself 
— the  lyrical  is  the  most  evanescent  atti- 

[14] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

tude  toward  life;  and  as  all  feeling  tends 
to  subside  after  the  exciting  cause  is  re- 
moved, so  the  lyric  is  the  representation  of 
a  changed  and  dying  feeling.  Because 
the  emotion  is  involuntary,  its  career  in 
the  poet's  spirit  will  be  to  a  degree  a  reve- 
lation of  his  character,  and  in  that  revela- 
tion some  glimpse  of  his  past  and  future 
will  be  involved ;  but  the  emphasis  will  re- 
main upon  the  sense  of  the  present,  and 
from  this  flow  the  lyrical  qualities — the 
immediate  emotion  and  its  subsiding. 

This  transitory  nature  of  feeling  has 
troubled  both  poets  and  critics,  as  the  pass- 
ing of  time  troubles  every  meditative 
spirit,  who  would  make  eternal  the  high 
moments  of  life.  In  the  lyric  to  fix  the 
most  fleeting  emotion  has  seemed  impera- 
tive, but  how?  Many  a  poet  has  been  dis- 
posed to  let  the  emotion  subside  into  a 
broad  generalized  frame  of  mind — into  a 

[15] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

reflection  or  a  prophecy — and  so  rescue  a 
permanent  lesson  from  the  sinking  mood. 
But  whether  this  disposition  tactfully  in- 
sinuates itself,  as  in  Wordsworth,  or 
hluntly  ohtrudes,  as  in  Longfellow,  the 
suspicion  grows  upon  the  reader  that  it  is 
a  defect  of  art;  the  poet's  reflection,  or 
whatever  else  he  gets  from  his  emotion,  is 
likely  to  be  personal  and  peculiar — more 
and  more  so  as  time  separates  him  from 
his  audience,  for  ages  differ  in  their  con- 
ventional thoughts  more  than  in  their 
feelings. 

Recognizing  this  difficulty,  criticism  has 
never  agreed  with  the  poets  that  the  eter- 
nity of  the  lyric  should  be  provided  for  in 
the  end  of  it,  in  the  more  intellectual  part ; 
rather,  theorists  of  literature  have  formu- 
lated a  platitude  that  the  lyric  is  great  by 
virtue  of  elemental,  universal  emotion. 
This  would  seem  to  be,  however,  a  reading 

[1G] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

of  history  into  a  prudent  recipe  for  fame. 
Unless  it  is  an  affectation,  the  lyric  ren- 
ders an  emotion  truly  felt,  and  this  sin- 
cerity of  intuition  appears  to  be  all  that 
the  poet  can  be  expected  to  care  about,, 
So  far  as  his  fame  is  concerned,  the  great- 
ness of  his  poem  will  depend  upon  the 
number  of  men  who  share  his  emotion. 
That  he  ought  not  to  take  thought  over- 
much, nor  choose  between  emotions  even 
if  he  could,  seems  proved  by  the  very  large 
number  of  lyrists  who  have  come  to  their 
own  through  the  belated  sympathy  of  a 
new  age,  to  which  they  would  never  have 
appealed  had  they  consulted  contempo- 
rary preferences  in  their  emotions.  And 
even  if  the  lyric  poet  has  missed  fame  by 
the  singularity  of  his  reactions  to  experi- 
ence, his  work  is  still  recognized  as  lyrical 
if  it  have  the  attitude  that  responds  to  life 
always  as  a  rapturous  present  moment. 

[17] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

III 

In  its  unconscious  revelation  of  char- 
acter, every  lyric  suggests  a  momentum 
of  previous  conduct,  choices  made,  habits 
formed ;  and  to  the  extent  of  this  implica- 
tion of  the  past,  a  lyric  is  a  kind  of  drama. 
The  difference  between  them  is  only  a 
shifting  of  emphasis.  Every  drama  is  in 
a  high  sense  lyrical,  for  it  must  be  imag- 
ined as  happening  in  the  present;  and 
every  character  in  it,  supposed  to  be  liv- 
ing in  the  present,  is  a  lyrical  character. 
But  the  emphasis  of  the  whole  is  upon  the 
past.  That  the  drama  is  the  exhibition  of 
human  will  is  true  only  so  far  as  it  ex- 
hibits a  harvested  past,  character  return- 
ing upon  itself  in  the  guise  of  fate;  for 
if  a  person  in  a  play  should  will  something 
inconsistent  with  his  known  past,  or  if 
some  trick  of  fortune  should  release  him 

[18] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

from  his  past,  the  play  would  not  satisfy 
the  dramatic  sense.    That  situation  is  dra- 
matic which  brings  men  suddenly  to  ac- 
count, and  he  who  has  the  eye  for  drama 
sees  in  life  a  perpetual  judgment  day. 
It  is  not  a  matter  of  analysis,  nor  of  train- 
ing, but  of  temperament,  and  therefore 
the  young  Shakspere,  when  he  writes  a 
sonnet-sequence,    manages    to    write    a 
drama,  and  later,  when  the  structure  of 
his  plays  seems   premeditated  or  elabo- 
rated, the  complexity  can  be  accounted 
for  by  the  dramatic  sense  through  which 
he  apprehends  life.    There  are  two  plots 
in  the  Merchant  of  Venice;  how  clever 
Shakspere   was,   say   the   commentators, 
to  join  both  in  one  play.    But  given  the 
character  of  Antonio,  the  merchant,  and 
Shakspere   would   have   been    forced   to 
invent  the  equivalents  of  those  two  plots, 
if  he  had  not  laid  hands  on  them.    For  An- 

[19] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

tonio  is  a  moody  creature,  extravagant  in 
his  generosity,  careless  and  reckless  in  his 
prejudices.  He  is  a  contradiction  of  him- 
self, and  his  life,  viewed  dramatically, 
must  show  the  simultaneous  reaping  of 
his  good  and  bad  acts.  His  insulting 
bravado  with  Shylock  gets  him  into  dan- 
ger, but  his  loan  to  Bassanio,  the  generos- 
ity bound  up  with  the  insult  and  the  brav- 
ado, brings  Portia  to  his  aid;  and  when 
the  two  streams  of  fate  balance,  he  be- 
comes again  what  he  was  before — moody 
and  contradictory. 

To  say  that  Shakspere  constructed 
this  consistency  is  to  forget  that  without 
such  consistency  one  cannot  conceive  of 
life  as  the  accomplishment  of  the  past. 
The  secret  of  this  harmony  of  form  is  not 
in  Shakspere's  craft,  but  in  his  intuition. 
Nor  need  we  attribute  to  the  Greek 
dramatist  any  particular  theory  of  hered- 

[20] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

ity,  if  in  the  CEdipus  story  the  past  that  is 
reaped  extends  over  two  generations.  His 
parents  grasped  at  opportunity  at  all 
costs,  and  (Edipus  inherits  their  impul- 
siveness, their  inability  to  consider.  To 
be  sure  he  is  indifferent  to  the  identity  of 
the  old  man  he  killed  on  the  highway,  and 
he  risks  his  life  to  share  the  throne  of  a 
queen  whom  he  does  not  know  and  has 
never  seen.  But  only  his  father  would  so 
forget  his  royalty  as  to  quarrel  on  the 
highway  with  a  young  vagabond,  and  only 
his  mother  would  promise  herself  indiffer- 
ently to  whoever  should  answer  the 
Sphinx.  It  is  the  same  character  in  all 
three,  and  the  fault  is  alike  ruinous  to  all. 
The  fact  that  all  three  characters  sub- 
mit, as  it  were,  to  the  same  judgment  day 
and  are  punished  for  the  same  fault,  sug- 
gests the  observation  in  passing,  that  the 
dramatic  point  of  view  tends  to  unify  life 

[2U 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

at  any  given  moment  by  discovering  in  it 
a  homogeneous  past.  Just  as  the  student 
of  anatomy  sees  the  passers-by  as  skele- 
tons, and  as  the  journalist  who  investi- 
gates graft  comes  to  attribute  every  defect 
of  government  to  peculation,  so  the  drama- 
tist, studying  the  past  as  reaped  by  one 
person  in  his  play,  is  likely  to  attribute  a 
similar  past  to  other  characters.  This 
duplication  of  theme  is  so  familiar  as 
hardly  to  need  illustration.  Twelfth 
Night,  a  love  story,  shows  all  its  char- 
acters except  the  clown  to  be  in  some  stage 
of  love;  Measure  for  Measure,  similarly, 
exhibits  the  degrees  of  the  fear  of  death 
in  various  natures ;  and  King  Lear  studies 
life  as  a  problem  of  filial  relations.  The 
significant  thing  is  that  this  economy  of 
situation  and  theme  is  not  a  matter  of 
choice  or  craft  with  the  dramatist,  any 
more  than  the  observation  of  men  as  skele- 

[22] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

tons  is  economy  of  point  of  view  with  the 
anatomist;  it  lies  rather  in  the  method  or 
means  of  perception — in  the  dissective 
eye,  and  in  the  dramatic  sense. 

The  immediate  effect,  however,  of  any 
play  read  or  seen,  is  less  logical,  less  rig- 
idly consistent,  because  of  the  lyrical  ele- 
ment— the  emphasis  of  the  present  mo- 
ment in  all  the  characters.  If  the  story 
is  to  be  of  value  as  proving  the  past,  the 
persons  must  all  speak  and  act  conscious 
only  of  the  present,  without  suspicion  that 
they  are  terms  in  a  demonstration.  That 
is,  they  must  act  and  speak  lyrically.  Each 
present  moment,  as  it  passes  through  the 
reader's  or  the  spectator's  mind,  will  be 
interesting  in  proportion  to  its  emotional 
intensity,  which  is  furnished  partly  by  the 
lines,  partly  by  the  acting,  partly  by  the 
situation.  These  all  are  lyrical  elements. 
Situation  has  nothing  to  do  with  the  dra- 

[23] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

matic  sense,  except  as  it  affords  char- 
acter an  opportunity  to  display  itself;  it 
looks  to  the  present,  and  sometimes  to  the 
future,  but  never  to  the  past.  How  un- 
conscious of  the  past  the  acting  must  be, 
has  just  been  suggested.  The  lines  may 
be  very  lyrical,  as  in  Romeo  and  Juliet, 
without  much  glancing  at  the  dramatic 
drift,  or  they  may  be  capable  of  a  double 
meaning,  lyrical  to  the  speaker  and  dra- 
matic to  his  hearers,  as  in  Macbeth. 

The  kind  of  character  or  emotion  re- 
vealed in  the  lyric,  we  saw,  has  been 
thought  to  have  a  bearing  upon  its  prob- 
able fame.  It  is  obvious,  however,  that 
drama  may  be  judged  either  by  the  kind 
of  emotion,  the  kind  of  character  exhibited 
— from  the  standpoint  of  the  actor — or  by 
the  extent  to  which  the  reaping  of  the  past 
is  felt.  It  is  a  common  enough  phenom- 
enon of  stage  history  that  the  popular 

[24] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

favor  often  leaps  to  the  lyrical  side,  and 
many  a  play  dramatically  bad  succeeds 
because  it  contains  some  character  lyrically 
good.  But  if  the  play  gives  a  strong 
enough  sense  of  the  past,  that  is,  if  the 
characters  are  consistent  with  their  own 
history,  they  may  be  lyrically  what  they 
please;  they  must  in  that  case  appeal  less 
upon  the  virtue  of  their  emotions  than 
upon  the  justice  of  their  fate.  An  audi- 
ence will  permit  the  lyric  to  express  only 
such  emotions  as  they  at  the  moment  un- 
derstand, but  in  the  drama  they  will  ac- 
cept the  emotion  tentatively  until  they  see 
what  is  to  become  of  it.  Satan  cursing 
God  in  a  lyric  will  not  please  the  pious, 
who  yet  would  be  delighted  to  see  him  in 
a  drama  cursing  God  and  getting  pun- 
ished for  it. 

The  drama  has  one  other  lyrical  effect, 
in  the  general  emotional  tone  it  conveys. 

[25] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

This  tone  is  serious  in  proportion  as  the 
work  is  felt  to  be  a  reaping  of  the  past; 
every  judgment  day  is  serious,  even  if 
we  are  acquitted.  Therefore  there  is  no 
clear  line  to  be  drawn  between  tragedy 
and  comedy,  for  different  men  and  differ- 
ent ages  will  disagree  as  to  what  is  seri- 
ous; nor  is  there  any  essential  difference 
between  tragedy  and  comedy,  since  a  mere 
change  of  opinion  as  to  what  is  serious  so 
easily  converts  one  into  the  other.  The 
occasion  of  laughter  or  merriment  in  the 
play  is  from  the  lyrical  part — from  the 
speech  or  the  situation  or  the  acting — 
and  we  enjoy  it  for  the  passing  moment; 
but  every  comedy  which  is  really  dramatic 
becomes  serious  with  time,  as  men  more 
highly  value  the  sacredness  of  human  na- 
ture. Beatrice  and  Benedick  amuse  us 
while  they  are  joking  or  while  others  trick 
them,  and  Petruchio's  behavior  at  his  wed- 

[26] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

ding  is  funny  while  we  hear  of  it,  but  in 
so  far  as  we  care  about  those  characters, 
such  episodes  grieve  our  sense  of  the  dig- 
nity of  life.  The  difference,  then,  that  at 
first  sight  appears  between  comedy  and 
tragedy  depends  upon  nothing  but 
whether  we  care  so  little  for  the  charact- 
ers that  laughter  is  adequate  armor  against 
the  judgments  they  unconsciously  pro- 
nounce upon  themselves,  or  whether  we 
require  a  nobler  kind  of  fortitude. 


IV 


The  lyric  is  closer  to  the  drama  than  to 
the  epic,  and  there  are  fewer  epics  than 
either  lyrics  or  dramas.  The  reason  is 
probably  that  a  sense  of  the  future — the 
ability  to  see  life  as  a  prospect  of  destiny — 
is  far  rarer  than  a  sense  of  the  past,  to 
say  nothing  of  the  immediate  sense  of  the 

[27] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

present,  and  it  seems  to  have  always  some- 
thing of  the  miraculous  in  it.  If  each  mo- 
ment can  be  seen  as  a  harvest  of  previous 
moments,  there  is  every  logical  reason  why 
the  interest  of  the  present  should  be  the 
future  it  promises;  but  only  men  of  un- 
usual faith  have  risen  to  this  logic,  and 
even  they  felt  the  promise  of  destiny  more 
as  a  gift  from  a  superior  being  than  as  a 
consequence  of  the  present.  Indeed,  where 
the  promise  reveals  itself  to  a  nature  of 
great  optimism,  it  often  takes  the  form  of 
strong  contrast  with  things  as  they  are, 
and  the  lyrical  and  the  epical  moods  in 
the  poem  are  almost  miraculously  contra- 
dictory. iEneas  is  humanly  weak,  his  ex- 
pedition but  a  frail  band  to  make  certain 
the  destiny  of  Rome;  the  poet  intends  us 
to  set  the  lyrical  mood  of  the  hero — regret, 
reluctance,  even  terror — over  against  the 
majesty  of  the  imperial  doom  he  served. 

[28] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

It  is  a  contrast,  not  a  consequence;  or  if  a 
consequence,  then  too  much  a  thing  of 
wonder  for  the  logic  of  normal  man. 

A  more  superficial  reason  has  usually 
been  given  for  the  small  number  of  epics 
in  literature,  especially  for  the  total  dis- 
appearance of  the  genre  in  modern  times. 
It  is  said  that  every  epic  must  have  a  plot 
in  heaven,  working  itself  out  in  human  for- 
tunes on  earth,  because  the  epic  exhibits 
divine  will,  as  the  drama  exhibits  the  will 
of  man;  and  since  we  no  longer  have  a 
well-peopled  anthropomorphic  heaven,  we 
can  no  longer  show  the  gods  plotting  there. 
But  to  say  that  the  epic  exhibits  divine  will 
is  only  to  say  that  it  gives  the  sense  of  des- 
tiny, the  feeling  of  guidance  to  an  end. 
Why  cannot  men  express  such  a  feeling 
without  a  scene  on  Olympus?    The  gods 
and  goddesses  of  the  old  epics  were  but 
part  of  the  language  with  which  the  epic 

[29] 


THE    KINDS    OF     POETRY 

feeling  was  expressed;  they  are  no  more 
essential  to  the  rendering  of  that  sense 
than  the  kings  and  queens  of  the  old  plays 
are  essential  to  the  drama.  If  only  we 
had  an  epic  to  express,  we  could  make  the 
language  for  it.  But,  say  the  historians, 
the  epic  has  always  dealt  with  a  world 
crisis,  involving  a  higher  and  a  lower  civ- 
ilization ;  how  can  we  have  this  large  kind 
of  poetry  again  until  we  have  another 
great  crisis?  If  the  historian  be  American, 
he  often  concludes  by  wondering  why  the 
Civil  War,  so  easily  comparable  to  that  of 
Troy,  never  found  its  Homer.  Yet  these 
explanations,  and  the  description  of  the 
epic  implied  in  them,  are  not  sufficiently 
searching.  The  world  crisis  which  is  clear 
enough  now  in  the  iEneid  was  probably 
not  clear  until  Virgil  made  it  so,  and 
whether  he  believed  in  the  mythology  and 
the  heaven  he  wrote  of,  made  no  difference 

[30] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

poetically  to  him,  and  makes  none  to  us. 
The  essence  of  the  epic  is  that  attitude 
toward  life  which  sees  in  the  moment  a 
destined  future.  This  attitude  in  no  sense 
is  conditioned  by  acquaintance  with  Greek 
theology,  nor  by  use  of  classical  hexam- 
eters, nor  by  division  into  a  certain  num- 
ber of  books,  nor  by  any  other  accident  of 
form.  It  may  invest  itself  with  each  or 
all  of  these  circumstances,  but  they  are 
not  essential  to  it.  The  epic  attitude  in 
Don  Quixote,  without  aid  of  gods  in  a 
heavenly  plot,  exhibits  itself  in  that  pa- 
thetic brooding  upon  the  destiny  of  Spain 
of  which  the  great  novel  is  eloquent.  The 
epic  attitude  in  the  Song  of  Roland  is  like- 
wise not  a  matter  of  celestial  furniture,  nor 
of  Greek  or  Roman  verse,  but  a  matter,  as 
Gaston  Paris  said,  of  love  for  an  idealized 
France,  for  the  country  which  seemed  the 
appointed  champion-in-arms  of  Christen- 

[31] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

dom.  The  epic  attitude  in  the  work  of 
Victor  Hugo,  another  but  a  similar 
idealization  of  France,  is  not  completely 
expressed  in  one  of  his  writings,  but  dif- 
fused through  all  of  them.  That  the  Don 
should  be  shipwrecked  by  the  actual  facts 
of  life,  or  that  Roland  should  be  slain  by 
the  Saracens,  diminishes  as  little  from  the 
sense  of  destiny  as  that  Aeneas  should 
sometimes  be  frightened.  The  A  eneid  and 
the  Song  of  Roland  and  Don  Quixote  are 
the  work  of  men  who  conceived  of  their 
race  as  serving  a  prospect  of  fate.  With- 
out this  attitude  no  epic  is  possible. 

If  literature  is  now  comparatively  bar- 
ren of  this  kind  of  poetry,  may  it  not  be 
because  this  age,  in  spite  of  much  theoriz- 
ing, has  no  confidence  as  to  what  its  des- 
tiny may  be?  It  is  not  that  we  have  lost 
the  gods.  If  we  no  longer  have  Milton's 
celestial  personages  and  geography,  we 

[32] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

have  the  idea  of  evolution,  which  ought  to 
give  the  strongest  possible  conviction  of 
our  future.  But  evolution,  whether  in  the 
hands  of  the  literary  historian  or  in  those 
of  the  scientist,  has  been  exclusively  occu- 
pied in  clarifying  and  reinforcing  our 
sense  of  the  past ;  it  has  not  even  suggested 
whither  we  are  bound.  No  wonder  that 
its  chief  service  has  been  to  the  drama, 
which  with  a  new,  scientific  confidence  now 
shows  us  the  inevitability  of  one  moment 
upon  the  next,  the  sins  of  the  fathers  vis- 
ited mathematically  upon  the  children ;  no 
wonder  that  with  this  rejuvenated  day  of 
judgment  perpetually  before  us,  our 
drama  is  dark  and  tragic,  and  deals,  how- 
ever wholesomely,  with  our  worse  selves. 
The  beast  we  were,  constantly  returns  to 
bear  witness  against  the  man  we  think  we 
are. 

Exactly  what  sort  of  epic  we  shall  have 

[33] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

when  science  becomes  once  more  prospec- 
tive and  hopeful  it  is  hardly  worth  while 
to  guess,  but  the  permanent  traits  of  the 
genre  are  fairly  clear.  Just  as  the  lyric 
enters  into  the  drama,  so  the  drama  enters 
into  epic;  for  a  sense  of  destiny  involves 
some  guidance  out  of  the  past  and  the 
present,  the  direction  of  to-morrow  being 
found  as  it  were  by  the  two  points  of  to- 
day and  yesterday.  To  the  ancient  mind 
all  this  meant  simply  the  will  of  the  gods, 
within  such  limits  as  the  gods  were  free; 
therefore  a  drama  was  enacted  in  heaven 
reaping  the  past  of  the  divinities,  and  that 
harvest  became  on  earth  man's  fate.  To 
state  it  another  way,  man  would  be  most 
devout,  most  ready  to  attribute  his  future 
to  the  past  of  the  gods,  at  those  moments 
of  history  when  he  felt  himself  in  a  world- 
current  of  destiny.  Tasso  and  Milton  felt 
such  prophetic  influences,  though  they  sub- 

[34] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

stituted  the  Christian  heaven  and  divinities 
for  the  pagan.  And  however  the  future 
poet  creates  new  imagery  or  modifies  the 
old,  he  will  keep  unchanged  the  soul  of  the 
epic — the  prospect  of  the  race ;  and  in  this 
prospect  will  remain,  if  only  in  a  diffused 
state,  a  dramatic  consciousness  of  the  past 
from  which  it  grew. 

The  lyric  also  enters  into  the  epic,  not 
only  as  it  is  included  in  the  heavenly 
drama,  but  throughout  the  poem — most 
obviously  in  the  character  of  the  hero, 
upon  whom  the  will  of  the  gods  falls. 
Here  again  the  poem  may  be  judged  by 
the  lyric  impression — by  the  behavior  of 
the  hero.  Such  a  standard,  however, 
leaves  us  disappointed  with  most  epics. 
For  it  is  to  the  poet's  advantage  to  mini- 
mize the  strength  of  the  hero  and  magnify 
his  obedience,  in  order  that  the  power  of 
destiny   on   him   may    seem    irresistible; 

[35] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

otherwise  the  poet  may  find  he  has  written 
not  epic  but  drama.  It  is  best  rather  to 
judge  a  poem  by  the  quality  that  distin- 
guishes its  genre.  The  test  of  the  epic 
attitude  is  in  the  consistency  of  its  sense 
of  an  inexorable  future — which  is  quite 
apart  from  its  lyrical  excellences. 

Finally,  the  epic,  like  the  drama,  has  a 
total  lyric  aspect,  as  naturally  hopeful  as 
the  sense  of  the  past  is  naturally  seriouc. 
No  matter  how  somber  the  incidents  or 
the  situation,  they  are  in  the  epic  but  op- 
portunities for  the  display  of  destiny; 
every  moment  promises  a  new  beginning. 
For  an  epic  to  be  pessimistic  is  a  paradox, 
and  indicates  a  confusion  in  the  poet's  view 
of  life. 


If  these  definitions  of  the  kinds  of  poetry 

36] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

are  just,  tney  would  seem  to  open  for  the 
student  of  literature,  if  he  so  desires,  a 
new  field  besides  that  of  language  in  which 
to  apply  the  principle  of  evolution.  The 
changes  that  can  be  traced  in  literary  his- 
tory are  changes  not  of  poetry  nor  of  its 
kinds,  but  of  the  spiritual  ideals,  the  so- 
cial conventions  and  proprieties,  the  po- 
litical conditions,  which  at  any  given  time 
are  as  it  were  the  raw  material  of  litera- 
ture; and  in  this  material  some  principle 
of  evolution  may  perhaps  be  found.  For 
example,  the  history  of  English  drama, 
if  drama  is  the  sense  of  the  past  called  to 
judgment,  should  study  the  changes  in  the 
English  conception  of  what  is  a  test  of 
character.  The  Elizabethan  stage  dealt 
with  situations  of  great  adventure — with 
murders,  shipwrecks,  plots,  and  surprises ; 
whereas  the  modern  play  usually  prefers 
a  test  of  character  taken  from  an  ordered, 

[37] 

328603 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

quiet  life.  Evidently  there  has  been  a 
change  in  the  English  ideal  of  success  and 
failure.  It  will  not  do  to  assume  that  the 
nature  of  drama  has  changed,  nor  even 
that  the  process  of  time  has  made  the  mod- 
ern play  more  dramatic;  Lear  and  Mac- 
beth and  Othello  hold  their  own  by  any 
definitions.  But  it  is  illuminating  to  re- 
member that  the  successful  man,  in  the 
Renaissance  ideal,  was  one  who  could  cope 
with  every  public  or  private  emergency. 
It  was  not  enough  that  he  should  be  mor- 
ally good — a  beggar  might  be  that;  but  he 
— and  the  women  as  well — must  have  the 
varied  efficiency  of  gentlefolk  born  to  a 
career.  Viola,  Portia,  Orlando  meet 
emergencies  with  success;  Hamlet  and 
Othello  do  not.  The  modern  playwright, 
however,  would  be  most  unlikely  to  rep- 
resent any  of  these  excellent  persons  as 
tragic  victims,  because  the  modern  ideal 

[38] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

of  success  is  a  matter  of  living,  as  it  were, 
on  the  defensive,  not  by  rising  to  extraor- 
dinary accomplishment,  but  by  avoiding 
such  errors  as  later  may  embarrass  us ;  our 
typical  tragedy  shows  some  weakness  over- 
taking us  in  the  very  routine  of  our  exist- 
ence. Between  this  idea  of  failure  and  the 
Elizabethan,  there  is  a  change  that  can- 
not be  understood  without  the  historian's 
help;  and  there  are  similar  changes,  call- 
ing for  similar  help,  in  the  crude  material 
that  has  gone  into  lyrics  and  epics.  If  the 
study  of  these  changes  is  not  specifically 
the  study  of  poetry,  at  least  it  is  the  study 
of  man's  way  of  accounting  for  himself  to 
himself — not  an  ignoble  study;  and  its 
effect  would  be  to  show  the  roots  of 
poetry  in  life,  by  illuminating  man's 
eternal  effort  to  restate  life  so  that  it  will 
satisfy  him,  and  the  eternal  moods  through 
which  the  eternal  effort  is  made. 

[39] 


THE  TEACHING  OF 
POETRY 


THE  TEACHING  OF  POETRY 


IF  we  are  teachers  of  poetry,  it  is  the 
love  of  poetry,  one  may  suppose,  that 
made  us  so.  At  some  critical  moment 
of  childhood  or  youth  we  may  have  taken 
down  from  the  shelves  of  the  library  at 
home  what  seemed  a  chance  volume — but 
it  was  our  fate  in  our  hands.  We  opened 
at  random  at  that  sparse  distribution  of 
type  down  the  center  of  the  page  which 
we  knew  signified  verse.  What  good 
angel  bade  us  read  ?  A  cadence,  an  image, 
a  line — and  poetry  was  born  in  us,  the 
singing  heart,  the  divine  homesickness  and 

[43] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

the  growing  wings,  the  enchanted  mad- 
ness, sudden  and  beautiful  and  incurable 
beyond  other  kinds  of  falling  in  love. 

For  me  poetry  began  with  three  and  a 
half  lines  from  the  Idyls  of  the  King.  So 
vivid  was  the  experience  that  I  still  see 
just  where  the  words  stood  on  the  page, 
and  just  how  the  afternoon  sun  streamed 
through  the  window,  and  how  the  old 
green-bound  copy  of  Tennyson  was  trans- 
figured as  I  read — 

"Long  stood  Sir  Bedivere 
Revolving  many  memories,  till  the  hull 
Looked  one  black  dot  against  the  verge  of  dawn, 
And  on  the  mere  the  wailing  died  away." 

My  father  came  into  the  room,  I  remem- 
ber, and  I  read  out  the  lines  to  him.  He 
agreed  that  they  were  admirable,  but  to 
my  surprise  he  did  not  find  them  momen- 
tous. 

[44] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

Or  if  no  verses  awakened  us,  perhaps 
some  heaven-sent  teacher  brought  to  mind 
our  heritage  in  Tennyson  or  Shelley,  in 
Wordsworth  or  Milton,  in  Keats  or  Spen- 
ser; heaven-sent  he  seems  to  us  now, 
though  his  pedagogy  was  nothing  more 
than  drawing  aside  the  forgetfulness  that 
veiled  our  better  selves  from  us,  and  his 
"insights,"  as  we  called  them,  into  the  mas- 
ters were  but  naming  over  the  things  we 
too  in  a  groping  way  liked  best.  He  did 
not  introduce,  he  restored  us,  to  poetry. 
And  other  beginnings  in  poetry — second- 
ary beginnings,  they  might  be  called — we 
owe  to  teachers  of  literature  in  school  and 
college,  whose  chance  or  intended  allusions 
to  vital  things  in  books  and  to  ideal  things 
in  life  lighted  up  beauty  by  the  way.  To 
give  a  list  of  such  allusions  would  furnish 
no  clue  to  their  importance,  for  even  at 
the  time  they  seemed  casual,  and  memory 

[45] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

holds  them  without  much  contact  or  re- 
lation to  each  other ;  but  they  made  poetry 
more  intelligible  and  more  lovable.  I 
think,  for  example,  of  a  lecture  in  my 
freshman  year  in  which  a  comparison  was 
made  between  Lowell  and  Matthew  Arn- 
old. One  poet-critic,  I  forget  which,  was 
the  subject  of  the  lecture,  and  the  other 
was  brought  in,  perhaps  on  the  moment's 
inspiration,  for  a  natural  contrast  be- 
tween English  and  American  contempo- 
raries; but  it  was  the  contrast,  however 
incidental,  that  won  my  affection  for  both 
writers.  I  think  also  of  a  lecture  on  Shel- 
ley and  one  on  Milton,  in  which  the  splen- 
did reading  of  well-chosen  passages  made 
the  poets  live.  Such  moments  of  dawn 
or  starlight  never  cease  altogether  for  the 
poetry  lover,  though  the  glamour  is  on  the 
earliest.  Gratitude  prefers  not  to  dis- 
criminate among  them.    Should  I  be  more 

[46] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

grateful  to  that  Lowell- Arnold  talk,  which 
came  first,  or  to  some  wonderful  lectures 
on  Virgil,  which  I  can  hardly  expect  to 
hear  bettered?  Did  I  gain  more  from 
reading  those  lines  in  the  Passing  of  Ar- 
thur, which  were  for  me  the  doorway  to 
poetry,  or  from  reading  Plato's  Sym- 
posium, which  was  the  house  itself? 

The  desire  to  teach  poetry  then,  as  I 
understand  it,  is  the  desire  to  provide 
others  with  just  such  new-births  into  the 
world  of  imagination  as  we  have  received 
from  books  and  from  instructors.  Teach- 
ing poetry,  in  this  sense,  is  not  teaching 
meter  or  verse  forms,  nor  even  teaching 
the  subject-matter  of  poems;  it  is  the  mul- 
tiplying of  those  fortunate  moments  when 
the  soul  is  dilated  and  the  universe  en- 
larged. We  may  conclude  that  graduate 
students  have  in  mind  a  failure  to  provide 
such  moments  for  them  when  they  com- 

[47] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

plain,  as  they  sometimes  do,  that  the  course 
leading  to  the  doctorate  does  not  lead  them 
to  poetry. 

But  when  we  start  out  to  teach  poetry 
in  our  own  enlightened  way,  we  soon  fall 
into  a  suspicion  that  it  cannot  be  taught  at 
all.  We  begin  with  an  exuberant  purpose 
to  reproduce  our  good  fortune  in  the  lives 
of  others,  to  give  them  the  books  that 
helped  us,  and  to  imitate  for  their  benefit 
the  inspiring  insights  of  our  masters;  but 
somehow  the  magic  illusion  does  not  get 
created.  We  call  the  attention  of  our  stu- 
dents to  the  passage  from  Tennyson  which 
first  was  poetry  to  us,  but  our  students 
see  nothing  in  it  but  Tennyson ;  and  as  for 
imitating  our  former  teachers,  even  our 
colleagues  look  at  us  with  pity  when  we 
try  to  explain  the  secrets  of  the  priceless 
instruction  we  once  sat  under.    In  a  dark 

moment  we  recall  that  many  of  our  class- 
es] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY, 

mates  came  away  from  that  lecture  on 
Lowell-Arnold,  or  from  that  on  Virgil, 
untouched  by  any  gleam.  These  minis- 
trations, we  come  to  fear,  are  like  other 
service  of  the  spirit,  too  personal,  too  much 
indebted  to  the  place  and  the  hour,  for 
any  one  to  make  them  his  profession.  We 
may  in  a  sense  teach  literature,  but  not 
poetry,  we  fear.  We  may  lecture  on  the 
contributing  circumstances  of  literary  pro- 
duction, on  the  language,  on  the  lives  of 
the  authors;  but  for  poetry,  we  fear,  for 
the  spark  from  heaven,  the  student  like 
the  scholar  gypsy  must  wait,  and  we  half 
believe  with  the  scholar  gypsy  that  he  had 
better  wait  outside  our  class. 

We  are  not  likely  to  agree  on  any  ad- 
vice for  teaching  poetry  until  we  have  dis- 
posed of  this  primary  discouragement. 
Yet  though  the  discouragement  is  so  gen- 
eral, we  ought  to  dispose  of  it  easily.    For 

[49] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

we  know  there  are  many  successful  teach- 
ers of  poetry;  almost  every  college  has 
one  at  some  time  or  other — usually  all  the 
time.  Though  most  of  us  found  our  first 
love  of  poetry  in  a  hook,  it  was  probably 
an  inspiring  teacher  who  gave  us  our  sec- 
ond love  of  it,  and  sent  us  to  the  univers- 
ity. If  only  a  rare  man  could  be  found 
whose  pupils  became  poetry  lovers,  we 
might  well  call  him  a  genius,  and  give  up 
hope ;  but  since  there  are  a  number  of  such 
teachers,  why  should  we  think  their  equip- 
ment or  their  success  beyond  our  imita- 
tion ?  The  cause  of  our  discouragement  is 
that  we  try  to  reproduce  for  our  students 
the  exact  conditions  of  our  own  initiation ; 
we  would  have  them  admire  the  same  pas- 
sages in  the  same  poems,  and  we  even  at- 
tempt to  repeat  the  mannerisms  and  the 
very  words  of  our  teachers.  But  allow- 
ing for  every  variation  of  temperament  in 

[50] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

teachers  and  students,  and  for  the  acci- 
dents of  time  and  of  locality,  we  may  yet 
hope  to  teach  poetry  without  a  too  terrify- 
ing dependence  on  the  spark  from  heaven. 
To  a  certain  extent  we  may  even  cultivate 
those  apparently  magical  insights  into  lit- 
erature. Very  simply,  we  may  observe 
and  imitate  what  the  successful  teachers 
of  poetry  have  in  common.  What  is  their 
purpose  in  teaching  poetry?  What  pe- 
culiarities are  discoverable  in  their  equip- 
ment? 


II 


The  office  of  the  teacher  of  poetry  is 
easily  defined;  it  is  to  afford  a  mediation 
between  great  poets  and  their  audience. 
For  the  most  part  the  poets  addressed 
themselves  to  their  contemporaries  with- 
out suspecting  they  would  ever  need  in- 

[51] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

terpretation.  Certain  youthful  ones,  like 
the  Spenser  of  the  Shepherd's  Calendar, 
may  have  annotated  their  works  in  ad- 
vance, but  there  is  no  evidence  that  even 
they  looked  forward  with  pleasure  to  be- 
ing lectured  on  by  college  professors.  Yet 
even  for  the  most  direct  poets  time  has 
gradually  obscured  the  meaning,  by 
changing  the  language  or  by  dropping  out 
some  of  the  environment  which  made  the 
book  pertinent.  With  every  year  a  gulf 
widens  between  the  book  and  its  reader. 
The  office  of  the  teacher  of  literature, 
then,  is  to  supply  the  information,  the 
background,  whatever  is  lacking  to  make 
the  reader  at  home  with  the  book. 

But  if  we  are  to  explain  any  of  the  past, 
we  shall  need  to  know  all  of  it,  at  least 
as  much  as  possible;  we  must  draw  on 
more  than  one  kind  of  record,  on  history 
and  philosophy  as  well  as  on  fiction  and 

[52] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

imaginative   writing.     Perhaps   even   so 
we  shall  not  be  able  to  recover  the  past; 
but  if  the  whole  record  is  not  sufficient,  a 
part  of  it  certainly  will  not  be.    It  is  no 
accident  that  the  successful  teachers  of  lit- 
erature have  usually  been  students  of  phil- 
osophy or  of  history  or  of  both,  and  if  we 
wish  to  imitate  them,  our  first  step  must 
be  to  broaden  our  definition  of  literature 
until  it  includes  not  only  poetry  and  the 
novel,  essays  and  drama,  but  also  the  mas- 
terpieces of  biography  and  other  forms  of 
history,  of  philosophy,  and  of  science.    If 
such  a  counsel  of  indiscrimination  is  sur- 
prising, we  should  observe  that  here  is  no 
advice  to  teach  history  or  to  teach  phil- 
osophy ;  it  may  be  plain  in  a  moment  that 
such  services  are  quite  distinct  from  teach- 
ing poetry.    The  advice  is  rather  to  con- 
sider  all  masterpieces   of  expression  as 
literature,  as  poetry  if  you  wish — capable 

[53] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

of  giving  us  that  new  birth  of  the  imagi- 
nation which  we  defined  as  the  experience 
of  poetry — whether  they  happen  to  deal 
with  an  emotional  dream,  or  with  the  an- 
nals of  a  nation,  or  with  abstract  enquiry. 
If  even  in  this  form  the  advice  is  puzzling, 
it  is  so  only  because  we  are  students  of 
English  literature.  We  inherit  the  un- 
enviable distinction  of  having  put  poetry 
off  into  a  corner,  and  of  treating  with  con- 
tempt those  other  and  inseparable  records 
on  which  poetry  often  depends.  No  such 
advice  would  surprise  us  were  we  students 
of  Greek  letters,  nor  would  the  advice  be 
needed;  for  the  classical  scholar,  so  far  as 
I  know,  has  never  omitted  Aristotle  or 
Plato  or  Thucydides  or  Herodotus  from 
his  canon  of  literature,  any  more  than  the 
French  student  has  omitted  Descartes  or 
Rousseau  or  Voltaire.  Both  the  classical 
and  the  French  students,  therefore,  have 

[54] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

the  advantage  of  studying,  along  with 
poetry,  a  body  of  facts  and  a  body  of  ideas 
which  often  determine  the  inspiration  of 
poems.  In  teaching  English  we  do  some- 
times talk  of  the  ideas  of  evolution  in  In 
Memoriam,  but  we  ignore  those  predeces- 
sors of  Darwin  whom  Tennyson  studied, 
and  Darwin  himself,  of  course,  we  do  not 
read.  If  it  be  urged  that  he  did  not  write 
with  felicity,  and  therefore  deserves  to  be 
counted  out  of  literature,  what  shall  be  said 
of  Hobbes  and  Locke,  of  Berkeley  and 
Hume,  or  how  shall  we  dispose  of  such  an 
historian  as  Gibbon?  The  offerings  in  col- 
lege courses  would  indicate  that  these  writ- 
ers are  none  of  them  considered  germane 
to  the  study  of  literature,  not  to  say  the 
study  of  poetry. 

The  narrow  definition  of  poetry  which 
excludes  prose,  and  the  narrow  definition 
of  literature  which  excludes  history  and 

[55] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

philosophy,  are  in  a  sense  novelties  with 
us.  When  Sidney  defended  poetry,  he 
understood  within  the  term  the  parables 
of  Christ  and  the  dialogues  of  Plato;  of 
verse  writing  by  itself  he  said  little.  When 
Milton  wrote  of  his  ambition  to  be  a  poet, 
it  was  metrical  composition  that  he  had  in 
mind,  but  his  definition  did  not  preclude 
the  most  austere  of  philosophic  subjects. 
Shelley  in  his  beautiful  essay,  itself  a 
poem,  resumed  Sidney's  large  outlook, 
and  wrote  of  poetry  as  of  a  way  of  appre- 
hending all  phases  of  life,  even  in  prose. 
We  may  say  broadly  that  the  sixteenth, 
the  seventeenth  and  the  eighteenth  cen- 
turies in  England  defined  poetry  as  the 
French  or  the  classical  reader  would  define 
it,  and  that  even  in  the  nineteenth  century 
large-natured  critics  who  had  the  best  of 
their  training  from  the  century  before, 
took  this  just  view  of  literature.    But  with 

[56] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

the  romantic  movement  came  an  emphasis 
upon  feeling  as  opposed  to  thought,  and 
therefore  on  the  literature  of  the  emotions 
as  opposed  to  the  literature  of  reason.  To 
the  exponents  of  this  school  it  does  not 
seem  to  have  occurred  that  reason  can  it- 
self be  the  object  of  passion,  or  the  cause 
of  it;  on  the  contrary,  the  mathematical 
conceptions  of  a  Newton  were  relegated  by 
the  new  literary  taste  to  the  limbo  of  "cold 
thought,"  whereas  a  primrose  by  a  river's 
brim  became  the  occasion  for  poetic  tem- 
perature and  the  summons  to  poetic  medi- 
tation. 

The  formal  doctrine  that  only  those 
books  are  literature  which  have  to  do 
somewhat  exclusively  with  the  emotions, 
was  set  forth  in  De  Quincey's  half  forgot- 
ten yet  too  typical  letter  on  the  literature 
of  knowledge  and  the  literature  of  power. 
Knowledge  was  once  thought  to  be  power, 

[57] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

but  De  Quincey  did  not  think  so.  "The 
antithesis  of  literature,"  he  says,  "is  books 
of  knowledge.  .  .  .  All  that  is  literature 
seeks  to  communicate  power;  all  that  is 
not  literature,  to  communicate  knowl- 
edge." What  does  he  mean  by  power? 
Power  is  the  awakening  in  us  of  emotional 
aptitudes  or  forces  which  we  were  not 
previously  aware  of — a  definition  wide 
enough  to  be  harmless,  except  that  the  ro- 
manticist could  not  imagine  his  heart  so 
fluttered  by  an  accession  of  knowledge. 
"If  it  be  asked,"  he  says,  "what  is  meant 
by  communicating  power,  I  in  my  turn 
would  ask  by  what  name  a  man  would 
designate  the  case  in  which  I  should  be 
made  to  feel  vividly,  and  with  a  vital  con- 
sciousness, emotions  which  ordinary  life 
rarely  or  never  supplies  occasion  for  ex- 
citing, and  which  had  previously  lain  un- 
awakened  and  hardly  within  the  dawn  of 

[58] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

consciousness."  Those  books,  then,  which 
stir  the  emotion  and  dilate  the  imagina- 
tion— books  like  The  English  Mail  Coach 
— belong  to  literature ;  whereas  books  like 
Gibbon's  history,  since  they  supply  us  with 
knowledge  rather  than  with  emotion,  are 
not  literature,  but  the  antithesis  of  it. 

It  is  hardly  worth  the  time  to  argue 
with  De  Quincey,  who  nowadays  has  be- 
come the  mere  shell  of  an  author,  a  stylistic 
ghost.  His  theory  in  itself  might  even  be 
considered  unobjectionable,  so  long  as  it 
is  not  applied  to  any  particular  book.  But 
unfortunately  his  point  of  view  has  pre- 
vailed, to  the  harm  of  our  teaching  of  lit- 
erature. In  many  colleges  to  this  day  the 
formula  survives  that  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury was  a  well  of  true  poetry,  whereas 
the  eighteenth  century  was  an  arid  discip- 
line of  rhetoric — that  the  English  imagi- 
nation slept  fitfully  through  a  nightmare 

[591 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

of  suffocation  in  Dryden,  Pope  and  Gray, 
and  awoke  with  deep  breaths  of  gratitude 
for  being  alive  in  Wordsworth  and  Cole- 
ridge, even  in  Leigh  Hunt.  The  eigh- 
teenth century  has  become  a  mystic  term 
of  reproach,  which  like  some  other  mystic 
things,  will  not  bear  looking  into.  If  we 
are  thoroughgoing  romanticists  we  re- 
move from  the  century  any  writers  who 
do  not  illustrate  our  conception  of  it. 
"The  eighteenth  century,"  we  say  "was  a 
period  of  rhetoric  and  cold  facts,  wherein 
poetry  and  imagination  were  dead.  Wil- 
liam Collins,  however,  Chatterton,  Blake, 
Burns,  Thomson,  and  Cowper,  really  be- 
long to  the  nineteenth  century;  it  is  only 
by  an  accident  that  they  lived  in  the  eigh- 
teenth. It  is  only  by  an  accident  also  that 
Addison's  discussion  of  Paradise  Lost  and 
Warton's  Observations  on  the  Faerie 
Queene  appeared  when  they  did.     We 

[60] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

know  this  is  so,  because  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury did  not  care  for  imaginative  poetry." 
If  we  are  fond  of  Wordsworth,  it  is  with 
reluctance  that  we  admit  he  owed  some- 
thing to  Pope.  If  we  admit  any  merit  in 
Pope,  we  probably  concede  it  to  The  Rape 
of  the  Lock,  a  poem  which  could  have 
taught  Wordsworth  little;  but  we  balk  at 
the  Essay  on  Man,  though  it  is  not  more 
didactic  than  The  Excursion,  and  cer- 
tainly is  clearer  and  shorter.  We  may  be 
persuaded  to  approve  even  the  Essay  on 
Man,  but  beyond  this  we  absolutely  will 
not  go ;  here  we  take  our  stand  on  the  last 
perilous  edge  of  literature;  we  will  not 
drop  into  the  chasm  of  knowledge.  The 
invitation  comes  to  us  in  the  suggestion 
that  for  the  ideas  of  his  essay  Pope  drew 
on  Shaftesbury  and  Bolingbroke,  and  in- 
indirectly  on  Liebnitz;  and  to  read  those 
gentlemen  might  help  us  to  understand 

[61] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

the  essay.  But  why  understand  it  any 
better  ?  We  reflect  that  we  are  far  enough 
away  from  poetry  as  it  is. 

Perhaps  it  is  time  for  me  to  say  that  I 
hold  no  special  brief  for  Pope  nor  for  the 
eighteenth  century,  nor  do  I  fail  to  admire 
the  greatness  of  the  romantic  poets.  What 
the  lover  of  poetry  must  hold  a  brief  for 
is  the  truth  that  each  generation  gets  its 
poetic  thrill  out  of  slightly  different 
images  and  suggestions,  and  it  is  imperti- 
nent for  any  age  to  conclude  that  its  par- 
ticular way  of  enjoying  poetry  is  the  only 
right  one.  If  I  found  poetry  first  in  a 
bit  of  romantic  suggestion  in  Tennyson, 
naturally  I  am  not  the  less  grateful  to  the 
romantic  method.  But  other  people  have 
made  their  discovery  of  poetry  in  such 
lines  of  Pope's  as, 

"Act  well  your  part;  there  all  the  honor  lies," 

[62] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

or  even  in  passages  still  more  practical 
and  informing.  If  we  are  to  teach  all  of 
poetry  rather  than  some  particular  school, 
we  must  recognize  that  those  insights, 
those  enlarged  moments  of  the  soul,  which 
we  agreed  it  is  the  ohject  of  poetry  to  im- 
part, can  be  found  by  different  readers  in 
different  authors.  With  that  variety  of 
taste  it  would  be  useless  as  well  as  imper- 
tinent to  interfere.  Falling  in  love,  in 
poetry  as  elsewhere,  is  an  invariable  ex- 
perience, universally  understood;  but  as 
to  the  object  which  caused  the  excitement, 
there  is  no  need  to  agree. 

On  this  general  ground  we  might  well 
plead  that  the  more  intellectual  kinds  of 
writing  should  be  restored  to  our  defini- 
tion of  poetry.  But  there  is  also  a  special 
reason,  which  even  the  most  romantic 
teachers  of  poetry  now  admit.  The  ten- 
dency to  neglect  as  unpoetic  all  writers 

[63] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

who  are  given  to  vigorous  intellectual 
processes,  who  really  think,  and  to  praise 
exclusively  those  who  appeal  to  our  emo- 
tions, has  largely  destroyed  the  ability  to 
read.  A  serious  poet  to-day,  with  an  idea 
as  well  as  an  emotion,  faces  a  hospitable 
but  an  incapacitated  audience.  It  has  be- 
come almost  an  unfair  question  to  ask 
poetry  lovers  just  what  their  favorite 
poems  mean,  for  poetry,  by  romantic  defi- 
nition and  by  assiduous  practice,  has  be- 
come an  emotional  experience  without  co- 
herent meaning.  The  ill  effects  of  such  a 
definition  have  been  progressive.  Those 
who  refused  to  grapple  with  the  not  very 
profound  argument  of  Pope  soon  found  it 
inconvenient  to  follow  the  argument  in 
Wordsworth  or  in  Tennyson  or  in  Brown- 
ing. A  few  years  ago  a  stand  was  made 
against  this  increasing  reluctance  to  know 
what  poetry  specifically  means,  and  now 

[64] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

a  wholesome  reaction  is  well  started,  but 
for  the  moment  there  was  much  bandying 
about  of  the  phrase  "teaching  ideas  in  lit- 
erature," as  though  to  stress  ideas  were  to 
inject  into  literature  a  foreign  or  novel  ele- 
ment. All  that  the  phrase  actually  stood 
for  was  a  return  of  the  sane  conviction 
that,  provided  one  cares  deeply  for  the 
things  of  the  intellect,  ideas  are  proper 
subjects  for  emotion  and  therefore  for 
poetry,  and  that  those  writers  who  express 
intelligible  ideas  should  be  intelligently 
appreciated,  over  and  above  whatever 
emotional  power  their  art  may  afford. 
The  reaction  is  now  so  far  advanced  that 
we  need  not  forfeit  our  reputation  as  lov- 
ers of  poetry  if  we  insist  on  knowing  just 
what  Shelley  means  in  certain  portions, 
let  us  say,  of  the  Prometheus  Unbound, 
or  of  the  Epipsychidion;  nor  are  we  lost 
if  we  conclude  that  Shelley  did  not  always 

[65] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

know  what  he  meant.  We  need  not  be 
deaf  to  his  superb  music;  we  need  not 
deny  that  for  those  moods  which  are  satis- 
fied by  pure  music  lie  is  always  adequate; 
nor  need  we  be  blind  to  the  noble  intel- 
lectual designs  that  usually  do  clarify  his 
profuse  emotion.  We  need  but  discrimi- 
nate honestly  between  his  merits  and  his 
shortcomings,  between  his  moments  of 
thought  and  his  moments  of  uncontrolled 
feeling;  so  shall  we  deserve  the  confidence 
of  those  willing  students  who  try  to  like 
him,  since  he  is  a  famous  poet,  but  who 
cannot  see  at  all  times  what  his  poetry  is 
about. 

Ill 

As  soon  as  we  have  convinced  ourselves 
that  our  definition  of  literature  should  in- 
clude history  and  philosophy,  there  is  dan- 
fee] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

ger  that  we  may  become  teachers  of  his- 
tory or  teachers  of  philosophy,  rather  than 
teachers  of  literature.  We  are  most  likely 
to  become  historians.  There  is  of  course 
no  objection  to  teaching  history;  the  only 
question  is  whether  by  so  doing  we  are 
not  departing  from  our  first  ambition  to 
confer  on  others  our  love  of  poetry.  We 
should  observe  that  the  teaching  of  litera- 
ture as  history  differs  radically  from  the 
use  of  history  to  understand  literature. 
It  is  true,  of  course,  that  poetry  is  a  rec- 
ord of  thoughts  and  feelings,  and  that  we 
may  try,  if  we  wish,  to  trace  the  develop- 
ment of  culture  in  English  poetry  from 
Beowulf  to  Blake.  But  there  are  grave 
difficulties  in  the  way,  and  even  if  the  per- 
formance were  easy,  there  would  be  noth- 
ing in  it  to  make  one  necessarily  a  lover 
of  poetry,  any  more  than  Gibbon's  mas- 
terly summarizing  of  theological  creeds 

[67] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

would  make  converts  to  them.  And  even 
from  the  historical  point  of  view,  poetry 
is  dangerous  material  from  which  to 
recover  the  visage  of  the  past.  In  pro- 
portion to  the  completeness  with  which  it 
reflects  life,  it  is  a  mirror  for  every  age  to 
see  itself  in,  but  we  do  not  look  into  mir- 
rors to  see  the  person  who  was  there  be- 
fore us.  The  great  poets  capture  a  whole 
field  of  vision,  though  focusing  on  only  a 
part  of  it;  we  can  find  in  the  picture,  as 
we  can  find  in  life,  many  details  that  never 
interested  them.  In  this  inclusiveness  the 
poet,  unlike  the  philosopher  or  the  his- 
torian, is  often  more  profound  than  he 
intended  to  be.  Reflecting  on  this  fact, 
we  may  be  chary  of  ascribing  to  any  poet, 
or  to  his  age,  the  things  in  his  works  that 
are  precious  to  us.  Nothing  in  recent 
years,  for  example,  has  probably  been 
more  satisfying  to  lovers  of  poetry  than 

[68] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

the  revival  of  interest  in  Euripides  among 
English  readers — a  revival  brought  about 
largely  by  the  genius  and  the  enthusiasm 
of  Professor  Gilbert  Murray.  But  along 
with  this  appreciation  of  the  noble  poetry, 
perhaps  finally  to  undermine  that  appre- 
ciation, if  we  only  knew,  has  gone  much 
emphasis  upon  the  modern  note  in  Euri- 
pides— upon  his  foreknowledge,  as  it  were, 
of  the  problems  that  distress  our  age.  Be- 
yond question  it  is  possible  to  quote  from 
him  passages  strangely  apposite  to  con- 
temporary themes,  yet  it  does  not  follow 
that  he  had  any  more  understanding  of 
our  times  than  other  poets  equally  great, 
or  that  his  message  is  more  intimate  for 
us  than  it  was  for  men  a  hundred  years 
ago.  It  is  Professor  Murray  who  belongs 
to  our  age;  to  say  that  Euripides  is  mod- 
ern may  well  be  only  an  awkward  and  mis- 
leading way  of  registering  his  immortality, 

[69] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

his  capacity  for  being  interpreted  to  any 
age.  Though  we  can  find  our  thoughts 
expressed  in  him,  we  hardly  need  to  revise 
our  notion  of  the  Greeks,  so  as  to  attribute 
our  thoughts  to  them.  In  some  cases  the 
contemporary  note  is  palpable  luck. 
When  the  old  nurse,  trying  to  persuade 
Hippolytus  to  love  Phaedra,  remarks  that 
Aphrodite  is  a  beautiful  goddess,  univer- 
sally worshipped  among  men,  the  youth, 
who  is  devoted  to  Artemis,  answers  that 
what  god  one  worships  is  a  matter  of 
taste.  Does  the  reply  sound  sophisticated, 
disillusioned?  Perhaps  it  is  so  to  readers 
at  least  tentatively  monotheistic,  but  noth- 
ing could  be  more  sensibly  pious  on  the 
lips  of  a  youth  like  Hippolytus,  who  had  a 
number  of  gods  to  choose  from. 

If  poetry  has  the  faculty  of  reflecting 
various  meanings,  of  expressing  the  reader 
quite  as  much  as  it  expresses  the  writer, 

[70] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

i 
and  if  for  that  reason  it  is  dangerous  ma- 
terial with  which  to  teach  history,  for  the 
same  reason  it  is  an  unsafe  vehicle  for  the 
teaching  of  philosophy.  Here  also  we 
should  observe  that  the  teaching  of  litera- 
ture as  philosophy  differs  radically  from 
the  use  of  philosophy  to  understand  litera- 
ture. When  we  would  appreciate  the 
Essay  on  Man,  there  is  an  advantage  in 
knowing  Shaftesbury  and  Bolingbroke, 
just  as  there  is  an  advantage  in  knowing 
the  early  theories  of  evolution  when  we 
would  read  In  Memoriam;  if  it  was  an 
idea  that  stirred  the  poet's  emotion,  per- 
haps we  must  understand  the  idea  before 
the  same  emotion  will  be  stirred  in  us. 
But  there  is  a  world  of  difference  between 
emotional  contact  with  an  idea  and  philo- 
sophic control  of  it.  Certain  ideas,  the 
denial  of  the  old-fashioned  kind  of  im- 
mortality, for  example,  produced  a  mo- 

[71] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

mentous  effect  on  Tennyson,  leaving  him 
perplexed  and  wrought;  in  time  he  got 
used  to  his  perplexities,  without  solving 
any  of  them,  and  he  had  the  genius  to  give 
us  a  faithful  record  of  his  doubts,  just  as 
they  beset  him,  and  a  faithful  record  of 
his  getting  used  to  them.  There  may  be 
a  philosophy  in  the  writers  he  had  been 
reading,  who  produced  this  effect  upon 
him,  but  there  is  no  philosophy  in  In  Me~ 
moriam,  no  system  of  thought,  only  a  series 
of  emotional  reactions  to  ideas.  Those  in- 
defatigable commentators  who  still  ap- 
proach the  poem  in  the  faith  that  Tenny- 
son, being  a  good  poet,  ought  to  have  a 
sound  theology,  are  sore  put  to  it  to  fur- 
nish him  out  of  their  own  philosophies 
with  even  a  patched-up  and  dubitable  sys- 
tem. Desiring  to  get  a  precise  transla- 
tion  of  what  the  poet  by  his  own  account 
only  vaguely  felt,  they  must  wrangle  for- 

[72] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

ever  as  to  just  what  was  intended  by 
"Strong  son  of  God,  immortal  love,"  at 
one  end  of  the  poem,  or  by  "One  far  off 
divine  event,"  at  the  other.  The  question 
would  be  a  fair  one  to  ask  of  a  philoso- 
pher, but  it  is  an  unfair  one  to  ask  of  a 
poet  who  for  the  moment  records  not  ideas 
but  the  distress  produced  by  them.  Even 
when  the  poet  is  intentionally  philosophi- 
cal, as  Pope  is  in  his  Essay,  or — to  take  a 
great  example  at  once — as  Lucretius  is  in 
his  epic  of  nature,  there  is  something  more 
permanent  in  him  than  the  philosophy; 
there  is  what  we  call  poetry,  that  kindling 
of  the  heart  and  the  imagination  which 
philosophy  may  be  the  cause  of,  but  which 
is  not  philosophy.  It  is  to  this  that  we 
first  gave  our  devotion,  and  it  is  this  we 
desire  to  teach. 

We  cannot  make  the  distinction  too 
clear.      Instead   of   teaching   poetry    as 

[73] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

though  it  were  history  or  as  though 
it  were  philosophy,  we  need  to  draw 
on  history  and  philosophy  in  order  to 
understand  poetry.  History  is  a  large 
word.  It  means  all  that  is  necessary  for 
us  to  know  before  we  can  be  contemporary 
with  a  poem.  To  read  Chaucer  with  every 
advantage,  we  must  recover  as  far  as  pos- 
sible the  frame  of  mind  which  the  men  of 
his  time  brought  to  their  acquaintance  with 
his  work.  We  must  know  their  language, 
their  political,  social  and  other  opinions, 
their  attitude  toward  life  and  toward 
poetry  in  general,  and  their  prejudice  for 
or  against  the  poet.  All  the  scholarship 
needed  for  this  recovery  of  Chaucer's  time 
may  be  conceived  of  as  history,  whether  it 
involves  learning  biographical  facts  or 
learning  a  language.  Study  of  this  kind 
is  the  only  magic  to  change  us  into  a  con- 
temporary of  any  remote  writer,  if  that  be 

[74] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

at  all  possible.  We  often  think  the  change 
costs  more  than  it  is  worth;  we  are  espe- 
cially rebellious  when  a  language  has  to 
be  mastered,  merely  to  read  a  poet  whom 
we  may  not  care  for,  after  all.  So  un- 
popular has  language  study  become,  that 
the  entire  moral  responsibility  for  it  will 
shortly  rest  on  heartless  graduate  faculties. 
But  this  ought  not  to  surprise  us  in  an 
era  when  it  has  been  considered  no  han- 
dicap to  a  reader  not  to  know  just  what 
his  favorite  poet  means.  For  many  of  us, 
of  course,  philology  in  the  narrow  sense 
may  never  prove  alluring ;  at  most  it  may 
be  for  us  only  a  limited  approach  to 
poetry.  But  some  knowledge  of  language 
is  obligatory  if  we  are  to  make  any  com- 
parative study  of  literature,  whether  we 
compare  the  poets  of  our  own  race  in  dif- 
ferent centuries,  or  the  poets  of  different 
races  in  our  own  time ;  and  we  would  prob- 

[75] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

ably  admit  that  without  some  comparison 
of  poetry  the  teaching  of  it  can  hardly  get 
far.  The  summons  to  be  contemporary, 
to  study  the  poetry  of  our  own  time  and 
our  own  country,  is  a  gallant  encourage- 
ment to  be  self-reliant,  to  stand  on  our 
feet,  as  Emerson  and  Whitman  invited  us 
to  do.  Besides,  the  invitation  excuses  us 
from  learning  Anglo-Saxon,  or  German, 
or  French,  or  Latin  or  Greek.  Yet  what 
an  unimaginative  love  of  poetry  that 
would  be,  which  could  be  satisfied  to  rest 
on  one  time  or  in  one  place!  Whoever 
got  his  first  love  of  poetry  from  a  strictly 
contemporary  poem?  It  was  the  quick- 
ening of  imagination  in  us  that  made  the 
experience  poetic,  and  imagination  rarely 
gets  its  first  quickening  from  what  is  close 
at  hand.  Whether  we  read  back  into  time, 
or  crosswise  into  foreign  literature  of  our 
own  day,  some  arduous  study  of  language, 

[76] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

of  all  that  we  have  called  history,  and  some 
effort  of  imagination,  must  he  undertaken 
before  we  are  neighbor  to  the  poet  whose 
works  we  hope  to  understand. 

If  the  historical  approach  to  literature 
is  unpopular,  perhaps  the  teachers  of  lit- 
erature are  themselves  to  blame.  It  is  so 
easy  to  teach  history  instead  of  poetry; 
it  is  so  natural  to  assume  that  these  his- 
torical matters  on  which  we  spend  so  much 
study  have  to  do,  not  only  with  the  ap- 
proach to  poetry,  but  also  with  poetry 
itself.  The  whole  service  of  history,  how- 
ever, is  but  to  make  us  contemporary  with 
the  author.  Once  become  contemporary, 
we  are  in  no  better  position  than  any  other 
readers  who  are  about  to  make  the  ac- 
quaintance of  a  new  poem.  When  we  are 
finally  at  home  in  Chaucer's  age,  we  face 
there  the  same  problems  of  appreciation 
and  criticism  as  we  face  when  we  read 

1771 


THE    KINDS     OF    POETRY 

verse  in  the  morning  paper.  Does  the 
poem  thrill  us?  Why?  Is  it  a  good 
poem?  Why?  The  study  of  history 
merely  postpones  these  elementary  ques- 
tions ;  it  never  can  answer  them.  The  fact 
that  Chaucer  derived  his  plots  from  Boc- 
caccio or  from  some  one  else,  and  the  fact 
that  his  language  evolved  largely  from 
the  Anglo-Saxon  or  is  recruited  from  the 
French,  can  have  no  bearing  on  the  value 
of  his  work  as  poetry.  No  matter  how  far 
scholarship  retreats  into  history,  it  is  still 
hacking  away  from  those  simple  questions 
that  baffled  the  critics  of  Fannies  First 
Play. 

The  young  lover  of  poetry,  recalling 
that  he  found  his  most  beautiful  experi- 
ence in  some  lines  the  author  and  date  of 
which  he  perhaps  did  not  know,  is  natur- 
ally wary  of  the  unconscious  tendency  to 
substitute  historical  information  for  liter- 

[78] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

ary  insight.  He  observes  that  the  purely- 
historical  approach  is  helpless  in  dealing 
with  a  poem  just  written — worse  than 
helpless,  for  it  often  tries  to  operate 
blithely  where  there  is  no  history.  I  once 
heard  a  great  philologian  tell  a  young  poet 
that  his  lyric  just  published  in  a  magazine 
was  one  of  the  most  admirable  poems  in 
American  literature.  The  happy  author 
asked  wherein  this  excellence  had  been  no- 
ticed, and  the  scholar  replied  with  enthusi- 
asm that  every  word  in  the  lyric  was  of 
Anglo-Saxon  origin.  I  still  see  the  look 
on  the  poet's  face.  Only  a  few  months  ago 
we  were  reading  a  description  of  a  well 
known  school  of  English  teaching.  The 
description  was  seriously  intended  and  en- 
tirely laudatory;  it  set  forth  an  ideal. 
"In  its  literary  studies,"  we  read,  this 
school  "aims  to  get  at  the  bottom  of  things, 
to  explain  relations,  to  trace  an  author  in 

[79] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

his  borrowings,  to  lay  bare  the  influence 
under  which  he  wrote.  To  mere  esthetic 
evaluation  it  turns  a  deaf  ear."  In  other 
words,  the  merit  of  this  way  of  teaching 
literature  is  that  it  attends  exclusively  to 
the  historical  approach,  and  resolutely  de- 
clines to  consider  what  the  poet  and  his 
readers  are  primarily  interested  in — the 
effect  produced  by  the  poem  itself.  It  is 
a  natural  and  fortunate  instinct  of  the  stu- 
dent, who  still  remembers  his  genuine  con- 
tacts with  poetry,  to  protect  himself 
against  this  theory  of  teaching.  Unhap- 
pily the  student  often  protects  himself  too 
much,  failing  to  see  the  immense  impor- 
tance of  historical  investigation  properly 
employed,  as  a  means  of  becoming  con- 
temporary with  old  poets. 

When  the  historian  stands  helpless  at 
last  before  the  poem  itself,  the  philosopher 
comes  to  his  rescue.    To  criticize  a  poem 

[80] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

written  yesterday  or  this  morning,  one 
needs  not  a  record  but  a  theory  of  life. 
We  pass  judgment  immediately  on  our 
neighbor's  actions,  on  his  thoughts  and 
emotions,  without  going  into  his  biog- 
raphy. An  account  of  his  life  might  in- 
deed affect  our  opinion  of  his  morals  or 
his  motives,  but  his  acts  themselves  we 
judge  by  our  own  scale  of  values.  Poetry, 
a  reflection  of  action  or  thought  or  feel- 
ing, is  judged  in  no  other  way.  The 
equipment  of  the  best  teachers  of  litera- 
ture is  principally  this,  that  by  experience 
or  study  they  have  arrived  at  a  coherent 
philosophy  of  life,  and  have  therefore  an 
instrument  with  which  to  take  hold  of  new 
emotions  and  new  thoughts.  It  makes  lit- 
tle difference  what  our  philosophy  is,  so 
long  as  it  is  sincere  and  thorough;  of 
course,  the  more  it  explains  of  life  and  let- 
ters, the  better  it  is,  but  the  desirable  thing 

[81] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

is  to  have  some  philosophy.  If  we  can  or- 
ganize our  teaching  of  literature  so  that 
our  students  will  come  in  contact  with  his- 
torical and  philosophical  masterpieces,  we 
may  hope  that  they  will  feel  not  too  far 
estranged  from  the  atmosphere  that  sur- 
rounds the  older  poets,  and  that,  once  be- 
come contemporary  with  those  poets,  they 
will  formulate  a  consistent  chart  of  life 
by  which  to  orient  themselves  in  all  poetry, 
even  in  that  written  to-day. 

IV 

The  service  that  philosophy  renders  in 
giving  insights  into  poetry  is  so  simple 
that  it  needs  no  elaborate  illustration. 
Yet  I  should  like  to  suggest  one  or  two 
examples,  if  for  no  other  reason  than  be- 
cause I  have  come  to  believe  that  the 
magical  "insights"  we  admired  in  our  for- 
mer teachers  can  be  acquired  by  anyone 

[82] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

who  will  first  get,  what  they  had,  a  sound 
philosophy.  We  shall  probably  derive  lit- 
tle help  from  the  usual  books  on  esthetics, 
though  it  is  to  them  that  the  literary  man 
would  naturally  turn;  rather  we  may  ex- 
pect to  find  inspiration  in  those  discus- 
sions which  are  not  of  art  but  of  life.  For 
myself,  I  have  usually  owed  most  to  those 
simple  observations  on  books  which  call 
attention  to  the  behavior  of  our  emotions 
in  ordinary  living.  To  make  these  ob- 
servations is  perhaps  the  achievement  of 
only  the  ripest  philosophy.  I  recall  a  class- 
hour  twenty  years  ago,  when  George  Ed- 
ward Woodberry  was  initiating  us  into 
the  genius  of  Keats.  What  was  said  at 
the  beginning  or  in  the  middle  of  the 
period  I  do  not  remember,  but  just  before 
the  bell  rang  to  dismiss  the  class  Mr. 
Woodberry  spoke  of  that  wonderful  last 
sonnet,  "Bright  star,  would  I  were  sted- 

[83] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

fast  as  thou  art."  He  called  our  atten- 
tion to  the  fact  that  what  Keats  had  to  say 
was  all  in  the  final  six  lines,  but  that  the 
first  eight  were  more  essential  than  per- 
haps they  seemed,  since  without  them  we 
might  not  be  in  the  mood  to  understand 
the  poet's  desire.  Keats  was  leaving  Eng- 
land, as  he  knew,  to  die,  and  his  mind  was 
on  his  betrothed,  whom  he  was  not  to  see 
again;  in  his  sickness  and  despair  he 
wished  he  might  lay  his  head  on  her  breast, 
and  die  in  that  comfort.  "But,"  said  Mr. 
Woodberry,  "you  cannot  approach  a 
stranger,  who  may  be  thinking  of  other 
things,  and  greet  him  with  the  news  that 
you  wish  to  lay  your  head  on  a  certain 
woman's  bosom ;  he  may  misinterpret  you. 
Knowing  the  need,  therefore,  of  prepar- 
ing the  reader  for  what  he  wishes  to  say, 
Keats  makes  us  think  first  of  the  star,  of 
the  moon,  of  the  moving  waters,  of  the 

[84] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

snow  on  mountains  and  moor — images 
vast,  exalted  and  austere;  he  colors  the 
lofty  mood  which  attends  these  images  by 
words  and  phrases  connoting  religion  or 
religious  ceremonial — 'Eremite,'  'priest- 
like task,'  'pure  ablution';  until  our  emo- 
tion, having  passed  through  these  intro- 
ductoiy  disciplines,  is  purified  to  interpret 
correctly  the  poet's  wish." 

These  words  of  a  great  teacher  of 
poetry  illumine  more  than  the  verses 
under  discussion ;  they  open  a  vista  of  that 
sort  of  skill  in  managing  the  reader  and 
in  allowing  for  the  way  words  and  images 
are  understood,  which  was  the  special  gift 
of  Keats.  After  Mr.  Woodberry  has 
shown  the  method,  it  is  easy  to  read  other 
things  in  Keats,  The  Eve  of  St.  Agnes, 
or  the  Ode  on  a  Grecian  Urn,  for  example. 
In  The  Eve  of  St.  Agnes  we  have  a  story 
of  exquisite  delicacy,  which  must  be  told 

[85] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETKY 

with  delicacy  if  told  at  all.  Porphyro,  the 
lover,  knowing  that  Madeleine  hopes  that 
night  to  dream  of  her  future  husband,  re- 
solves that  she  shall  dream  of  him,  or  at 
least  think  she  is  dreaming  of  him.  He 
therefore  conceals  himself  in  her  room  until 
she  is  asleep,  and  then  with  the  soft  chords 
of  the  lute  he  wakes  her  so  gently  that  she 
sees  him  before  she  can  distinguish  the 
dream  from  the  waking.  She  has  really 
been  dreaming  of  him,  and  now  the  actual 
Porphyro  seems  only  the  lover  of  her  vis- 
ion, turned  suddenly  pallid.  The  diffi- 
culty of  the  story  lies,  of  course,  in  the 
hiding  of  Porphyro  in  Madeleine's  room, 
but  Keats  ennobled  the  scene,  as  he 
secured  the  meaning  of  his  sonnet,  by 
manipulating  in  advance  the  emotions  of 
his  readers.  Madeleine's  room  has  a  win- 
dow of  stained  glass;  when  she  enters  the 
door  her  candle — her  "taper,"  as  Keats 

[861 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

calls  it — sends  up  its  smoke  in  the  pale 
moonshine,  as  if  before  an  altar ;  the  light 
of  the  moon  falls  on  the  silver  cross  she 
wears,  and  gives  her  hair  a  glory,  like  a 
saint's ;  her  robes  fall  to  her  knees,  and  she 
slips  into  her  "soft  and  chilly  nest"  as 
though  her  soul  were  a  missal  clasped,  or 
a  rose  shut,  to  be  a  bud  again.  So  man- 
aged, the  reader  takes  the  scene  as  Keats 
intended,  and  the  disrobing  of  Madeleine 
is  one  of  the  clear  purities  of  literature. 
But  after  Madeleine  is  awake  and  Por- 
phyro  has  declared  his  passion,  how  is  the 
poet  to  get  her  up  and  dressed,  without 
breaking  altogether  the  spell  of  the  story ! 
Even  to  suggest  the  question  would  be  dis- 
astrous. Keats  has  the  lovers  out  of  the 
castle  before  we  can  think  of  the  problem, 
if  ever  we  do  think  of  it;  he  lets  the  speed 
of  the  narrative  sweep  us  over  the  danger 
before  we  know  it  is  there. 

[87] 


THE    KINDS     OF    POETRY 

The  Ode  on  a  Grecian  Urn  exhibits,  I 
think,  an  even  more  wonderful  knowledge 
of  human  nature.  The  poet  describes  the 
two  scenes  painted  on  the  urn,  first  ren- 
dering them  as  though  they  were  actual 
life,  and  then  contemplating  their  immor- 
tality in  art.  Most  readers  would  say  that 
the  method  is  the  same  for  both  sides  of  the 
urn — first  the  picture,  then  the  praise  of 
its  immortality.  But  the  subject-matter 
of  the  paintings  was  not  amenable  to  this 
treatment,  and  Keats  allowed  for  a  differ- 
ence between  one  scene  and  the  other.  On 
one  side  of  the  urn  a  shepherd  is  piping, 
and  a  youth  pursues  a  maiden.  The 
painter  has  arrested  forever  in  an  attitude 
of  beauty  the  swift  flow  of  these  experi- 
ences. 

"Fair  youth,  beneath  the  trees,  thou  canst  not 
leave 
Thy  song,  nor  ever  can  those  leaves  be  bare; 

[88] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETEY 

Bold  Lover,  never,  never  canst  thou  kiss 
Though   winning   near   the    goal — yet,    do   not 
grieve ; 
She  cannot  fade,  though  thou  have  not  thy 
bliss, 
For  ever  wilt  thou  love,  and  she  be  fair!" 

With  this  picture  of  things  which  the 
memory  would  gladly  linger  on,  the  poet 
knows  we  shall  have  no  quarrel.  On  the 
other  side  of  the  urn,  however,  is  painted 
a  heifer  led  to  sacrifice.  If  this  picture  to 
be  immortal?  Shall  we  contemplate  for- 
ever the  priest  about  to  slaughter  the  vic- 
tim? Keats  again  gives  us  no  opportun- 
ity to  raise  the  question.  With  the  poetic 
tact  in  which  he  is  without  a  superior,  he 
turns  rather  to  a  scene  not  represented  on 
the  urn,  calls  up  the  image  of  the  village 
from  which  the  sacrificial  procession  has 
come,  makes  us  feel  in  a  phrase  the  silence 
of  the  village  streets,  thus  deserted,  and 

[89] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

then  contemplates  the  immortality  of  that 
lovely  silence  and  solitude. 

"What  little  town  by  river  or  sea  shore 
Or  mountain-built  with  peaceful  citadel, 
Is  emptied  of  its  folk,  this  pious  morn? 
And,  little  town,  thy  streets  for  evermore 
Will  silent  be;  and  not  a  soul  to  tell 
Why  thou  are  desolate,  can  e'er  return." 

These  poems  of  Keats  may  be  inter- 
preted by  a  wisdom  of  life  that  in  its  sim- 
plicity seems  rather  the  happy  wit  of  ex- 
perience than  a  system  of  thought.  But 
more  formal  philosophy  also  may  guide 
us  from  poet  to  poet.  George  Santa- 
yana's  great  sentence,  that  all  life  is  ani- 
mal in  its  origin  and  spiritual  in  its  pos- 
sible fruits,  has  given  to  many  of  us  a 
scale  against  which  to  judge  the  complete 
poet,  and  also  the  poet  who  reports  only 
our  animal  origins,  or  only  our  spiritual 

[90] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETR 


Y 


fruits.  If  all  life  has  a  natural  basis,  then 
any  art  which  tells  the  whole  truth  of  life 
must  portray  that  basis;  and  if  life  has 
also  spiritual  ends,  then  no  art  is  complete 
which  fails  to  portray  those  ends.  The 
love  of  Romeo  and  Juliet  is  of  course  based 
on  such  a  natural  desire  as  starts  youth 
always  to  seeking  its  mate ;  Dame  Nature 
seems  to  preside  with  as  much  puissance 
in  Shakspere's  drama  as  in  Chaucer's 
allegory  of  St.  Valentine's  day.  But 
Romeo  and  Juliet  differ,  let  us  say  from 
Antony  and  Cleopatra,  in  that  their  union 
has  a  meaning  also  for  the  mind  and  the 
heart.  Shakspere,  reading  life  by  a 
sound  philosophy,  comes  at  the  truth  that 
when  we  begin  to  be  aware  of  a  spiritual 
end  in  experience,  the  animal  basis  of  it 
somewhat  drops  away  from  our  thoughts ; 
when  we  are  truly  in  love,  therefore,  our 
passion  seems  to  us  a  yearning  chiefly  or 

[91] 


THE    KINDS     OF    POETRY 

only  of  the  soul.  By  this  illusion,  itself  as 
natural  as  breathing,  the  hearts  of  men 
and  women  bestow  upon  the  world  a  sig- 
nificance which  without  us  it  would  not 
have,  so  far  as  we  can  see.  Nor  should  we 
have  occasion  to  feel  this  consecration  of 
spirit,  so  far  as  we  know,  were  we  out  of 
touch  with  the  natural  world.  The  poet 
who  like  Dante  has  gathered  vast  spiritual 
meanings  from  comparatively  meager  ex- 
periences in  nature,  and  who  tells  us  those 
meanings  without  initiating  us  into  the 
natural  basis  of  them,  will  prove  for  all 
but  the  rarest  of  readers  a  difficult  poet — 
lofty  and  admirable,  but  not  easily  located 
in  the  world  we  know,  not  even  in  its 
heights.  The  poet  should  not  separate 
himself  from  our  world;  rather,  his  art 
should  rise  upon  it. 

And  his  art  should  rise.     We  will  not 
listen  without  protest  to  a  mere  recount- 

[92] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

ing   of   those   animal   or   material   facts 
which,  though  undeniable,  are  soonest  for- 
gotten when  we  begin  to   consider  the 
meaning  of  existence.    It  is  a  cheap  trick 
of  the  so-called  realist  to  strip  away  the 
spiritual   raiment   of   life,   that   he   may 
startle  us  with  the  sight  of  unaccommo- 
dated man.    This  is  the  one  nudity  which 
is  unbearable.     Our  first  parents  faced  it 
when,  having  sinned,  they  became  realists, 
and   were   ashamed   of   themselves.      "A 
lovely   complexion  is   nothing  but   good 
digestion;    why   lose   your   heart   to    the 
efficiency  of  the  digestive  tract?"  says  the 
realist  to  the  lover.  "A  violin  is  only  a  hol- 
low box,  strung  with  cat-gut  and  scratched 
on   with   horse-hair;   why   be   stirred   by 
Kreisler's  playing?"  says  the  realist  to  the 
musician.     "A  flag  is  but  a  cloth,  cotton 
or  silk;  why  die  for  your  country?"  says 
the  realist  to  the  patriot.    Life  thus  con- 

[93] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY   . 

sidered,  exclusively  in  its  physical  bases, 
as  if  it  had  no  spiritual  ends,  would  seem 
indeed  a  tale  told  by  an  idiot,  signifying 
nothing.  Those  who  are  tired  of  the  world 
may  like  such  a  portrait  of  it.  The  sane 
man  takes  life  as  a  whole,  as  a  complement 
of  body  and  spirit,  and  he  gives  his  affec- 
tion to  that  poetry  which  follows  the 
spirit,  yet  neither  forgets  nor  dishonors 
the  body. 


But  let  us  return  to  our  beginning.  If 
our  teaching  of  poetry  springs  from  our 
delight  in  it,  if  we  are  not  unwilling  to 
read  widely  in  the  whole  experience  of  the 
race,  if  we  can  recover  from  history  some- 
thing of  the  past  and  can  learn  from  phil- 
osophy to  understand  the  present,  what 
more  shall  we  add?    Only  this — to  be  still 

[94] 


THE    TEACHING    OF    POETRY 

as  we  were  at  the  beginning,  lovers  of 
poetry.  It  was  from  the  example  of  our 
teachers  that  we  learned  most.  Together 
with  the  historian  and  the  scientist  they 
felt  the  lure  of  scholarship,  but  we  looked 
to  our  teachers  of  poetry  not  for  scholar- 
ship alone.  If  we  are  to  give  our  own  stu- 
dents what  they  look  for,  we  must  keep 
fresh  in  ourselves,  as  we  grow  older,  a  ca- 
pacity for  that  poetic  experience  which 
lighted  our  youth.  No  human  task  is  eas- 
ier or  more  beautiful.  Or  is  it  a  task,  or 
only  a  happy  way  of  life  ?  Plato  described 
it  for  us.  "Wise  men  are  not  philoso- 
phers," said  the  prophetess,  "for  they  al- 
ready have  wisdom ;  and  ignorant  men  are 
not  philosophers,  for  being  ignorant  they 
do  not  know  their  need  of  wisdom." 
"Who  then  are  philosophers?"  cried  Soc- 
rates. "Those  intermediate  persons  among 
whom  is  Love." 

[95] 


THE  NEW  POETRY 


THE  NEW  POETRY 


IT  is  easy  to  see  why  the  "New  Poetry" 
should  at  first  excite  violent  attack 
and  also  inspire  indignant  defense. 
Many  of  the  new  poems  do  look  at  first 
a  bit  outrageous,  especially  to  old-fash- 
ioned readers  who  have  not  read  widely 
in  old-fashioned  literature.  If  we  have 
forgotten  or  have  never  seen  Macpher- 
son's  Ossian  or  the  prophetic  raptures  of 
William  Blake,  we  shall  get  the  full 
flavor  of  novelty  in  these  irregular  lines, 
saved  to  the  eye  as  verse  by  the  essential 
capitals,  and  saved  to  the  ear  by  nothing 

[99] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

at  all.  If  we  have  never  been  on  familiar 
terms  with  Tennyson's  English  idyls, 
such  as  Dora  or  Walking  to  the  Mail,  we 
may  think  we  have  discovered  a  new  art 
of  flatness  in  blank  verse  which  is  like 
nothing  so  much  as  prose  printed  ten  syl- 
lables at  a  stretch — good,  chatty,  domestic 
prose.  Or  if  we  have  never  felt  the  en- 
chantment of  Baudelaire's  prose  or  Cole- 
ridge's, we  may  wrinkle  our  brows  over  a 
page  of  solid  type  protruding  polyphonic 
cadences  here  and  there.  But  a  reader 
who  knows  the  history  of  poetic  experi- 
ment in  English  literature,  even  if  he  is 
ignorant  of  other  languages,  will  find  in 
the  new  poetry  nothing  that  is  really  new, 
and  nothing  that  need  be  condemned  on 
theoretical  grounds.  For  he  will  have  ob- 
served long  ago  that  meter  and  rhyme  are 
but  accompaniments  of  poetry,  and  not 
poetry  itself,  which  is  an  effect  of  beauty, 

[100] 


THE    NEW    POETRY 

never  to  be  confounded  with  rhetorical  in- 
ventions, and  which  is  produced  by  differ- 
ent races  in  different  ways,  according  to 
their  tastes,  and  in  different  ways  by  the 
same  race  at  different  times.  This  effect 
of  beauty,  which  is  what  we  have  in  mind 
when  we  say  that  verse  is  or  is  not  poetic, 
is  not  altogether  likely  to  make  itself  felt 
through  meters  or  rhythms  which  are 
strange  to  us ;  yet  we  are  not  for  that  rea- 
son justified  in  refusing  to  master  French 
or  Greek  prosody,  nor  is  the  contemporary 
poet  necessarily  foolish  if  he  invites  us  to 
find  poetry  in  his  revival  of  old  experi- 
ments in  verse. 

These  reflections  seem  obvious,  but 
emphasis  upon  them  suggests  itself  as 
remedy  for  the  kind  of  attack  usually 
made  on  imagism  and  free  verse.  To  be 
annoyed  at  the  new  poetry  because  it 
shows  a  growing  indifference  to  rhyme,  is 

[101] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

to  take  a  partisan  stand  on  what  has  long 
been  an  open  question — whether  rhyme  in 
English  verse  is  a  handicap  or  a  blessing. 
Similarly,  to  complain  that  the  imagists 
might  as  well  print  their  work  frankly  in 
prose,  since  only  the  capitals  tell  us  it  is 
verse,  is  to  lay  ourselves  open  to  the  ques- 
tion whether  we  could  distinguish  Mil- 
ton's verse  from  his  best  prose,  if  the  capi- 
tals did  not  give  us  the  hint.  English 
verse  rhythms  in  the  hands  of  the  masters 
have  been  so  free  (I  except  Pope),  that 
the  line  between  them  and  prose  rhythms 
has  never  been  successfully  drawn;  it  is 
often  difficult,  therefore,  to  distinguish, 
save  by  capitals,  between  the  poetry  a 
man  writes  in  verse  and  the  poetry  the 
same  man  writes  in  prose.  This  fact  the 
imagists  have  grasped,  and  they  seem  to 
realize  that  it  is  important,  but  just  what 
use  to  make  of  it  perhaps  they  do  not  al- 

[102] 


THE    NEW    POETRY 

together  see.  Obviously,  if  verse  rhythm 
in  English  is  already  so  free,  it  is  unneces- 
sary to  justify  free  verse  by  pointing  to 
its  "unrhynled  cadence,"  whatever  that 
may  mean;  and  it  is  sheer  nonsense  to  jus- 
tify this  new  appreciation  of  an  ancient 
freedom  by  hinting  that  the  freedom  never 
existed  before.  On  the  other  hand,  the 
critics  of  imagism  often  forget  entirely 
the  principle  which  the  imagists  only  mis- 
apply. A  troubled  scholar  has  been  at 
pains  to  show  that  imbedded  innocently  in 
Meredith's  novels  are  many  sentences 
which,  printed  as  free  verse,  turn  out  to  be 
admirable  imagist  poems.  But  what  has 
he  proved?  Only  what  he  knew  before, 
and  what  a  glance  at  Bartlett's  Familiar 
Quotations  would  have  recalled  to  him, 
that  great  prose,  like  great  verse,  often 
contains  great  poetry. 

The  suspicions  aroused  among  the  sen- 

[103] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

sitive  by  the  supposed  newness  of  the  new 
poetry,  have  been  aggravated  by  the 
stream  of  energetic  but  reckless  self-ex- 
planation which  has  flowed  from  certain 
of  the  imagists.  Had  the  new  poets  sim- 
ply written  poems,  with  no  campaign 
speeches  in  the  interest  of  their  own  im- 
mortality, it  might  have  been  easier  to 
realize  that  we  are  moving  through  one 
of  those  periodic  and  quite  normal  over- 
haulings  of  poetic  method  by  which  any 
literature  keeps  itself  vital.  Every  little 
while  it  will  always  occur  to  the  thought- 
ful that  poetry  is  going  a  little  dead,  that 
somehow  a  fresh  relation  must  be  estab- 
lished between  it  and  life.  If  this  convic- 
tion comes  to  a  genius,  the  results  are 
likely  to  be  for  the  great  benefit  of  poetry, 
but  whatever  the  results  the  conviction  is 
a  sign  of  health  in  those  who  feel  it;  for 
it  is  impossible  that  art  should  be  too  vit- 

[104] 


THE    NEW    POETRY 

ally  related  to  experience.  These  con- 
temporaries, then,  of  whom  we  speak  in 
a  loose  way  as  the  new  poets,  are  trying 
to  restore  vitality  and  reality  to  the  tech- 
nique of  verse-writing.  The  most  settled 
of  old-fashioned  critics,  no  matter  what 
he  thinks  of  imagism,  would  probably 
agree  that  few  poems  in  the  last  twenty- 
five  years  have  been  in  any  great  sense 
either  vital  or  real.  In  their  subjects  as 
well  as  in  their  technique  the  new  poets 
are  trying  for  greater  truth.  Technically 
they  wish  to  produce  verses  which  will 
sound  sincere,  spontaneous,  and  natural. 
They  wish  neither  the  diction  nor  the 
rhythm  of  verse  to  depart  so  far  from 
what  the  ear  is  accustomed  to  in  common 
speech  as  to  seem  an  artificial  utterance. 
In  this  ideal  they  agree  with  Wordsworth ; 
like  him,  they  would  make  the  ordinary 
serious  conversation  of  men  in  some  sort 

[105] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

the  standard  of  the  poetic  manner.  If 
the  rhythms  they  experiment  with  seem 
far  removed  from  the  Words worthian  line, 
we  should  remember  that  the  rhythms  of 
our  conversation  and  of  our  written  prose 
to-day  are  also  far  removed  from  the 
rhythms  of  his  conversation  and  prose. 
As  for  their  subjects,  the  new  poets  wish 
to  represent  every  picture  as  it  looks  to 
the  eye,  and  every  action  as  it  is  first  gath- 
ered up  in  memory.  Here  again  they 
parallel  Wordsworth's  desire  to  write  with 
the  eye  on  the  object,  but  they  stop  with 
his  method  of  observation ;  they  have  little 
use  for  his  philosophy  of  feeling.  Indeed, 
the  attempt  to  see  things  as  they  are  leads 
them  to  a  subordination  of  feeling,  to  an 
emphasis  upon  intellectual  keenness,  even 
upon  wit;  so  that  many  readers  have  sus- 
pected in  this  school  a  revival  of  the  influ- 
ence of  Pope. 

[106] 


THE    NEW    POETRY 

Yet  the  new  poets  have  prohably  had 
Wordsworth  or  Pope  but  seldom  in  their 
thoughts,  nor  do  they   owe  perhaps   as 
much  to  the  verse  of  contemporary  France 
as  some  imagistic  prophets,  Miss  Lowell 
for  example,  think  they  owe,  or  think  they 
should  owe.     They  derive  their  methods, 
unconsciously   or   consciously,   from   the 
masters  of  modern  realism;  that  is,  their 
art  is  the  product  of  much  novel-reading. 
For  decades  we  have  been  absorbing  prose 
records    of   manners,    of    characters,    of 
scenes ;  and  almost  any  literary  youngster 
in  England  or  America  has  had  some  in- 
itiation into  the  "methods  of  fiction"  or 
at  least  into  the  "art  of  the  short  story"; 
if  we  have  taken  no  courses  in  these  sub- 
jects in  college,  we  have  read  books  which 
made  the  whole  matter  clear,  and  most  of 
us  have  tried  to  practise  either  the  artful 
realism  of  the  French  or  the  naive  realism 

[107] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

of  the  Russians — until  a  generation  of 
readers  and  writers  has  grown  up  which 
sooner  or  later  would  be  sure  to  transfer 
the  methods  of  prose  realism  to  verse. 
The  new  poetry  is  simply  making  the  ex- 
periment for  us.  One  obvious  result  of 
the  transfer,  as  far  as  it  has  gone,  is  that 
we  have  something  calling  itself  poetry 
which  is  curiously  un-songlike — with  no 
more  singing-quality,  in  fact,  than  is 
found  in  the  style  of  Turgenev  or  of  Flau- 
bert. Whether  this  defect  of  music  is  in- 
evitable in  novelized  verse,  or  is  only  in- 
dicative of  temporary  embarrassments  in 
a  new  medium,  we  must  wait  to  see.  But 
the  fate  of  such  a  poet  as  Crabbe,  nobly 
imaginative  and  passionately  realistic 
though  he  was,  should  warn  the  new  school 
what  a  retired  corner  of  oblivion  is  re- 
served for  the  bard  who  cannot  learn  to 
sing.    A  second  result  of  this  transfer  of 

[108] 


THE    NEW    POETRY 

realism  is  that  all  kinds  of  subjects  are 
now  available  for  verse,  as  they  have  been 
for  the  novel.  This  means  that  the  charge 
once  brought  against  prose  realism,  espe- 
cially as  practised  in  France,  that  it  often 
deals  with  subjects  of  no  spiritual  signifi- 
cance— at  times,  preferably  with  brutal 
subjects — may  well  be  made  now  against 
some  of  these  realistic  poems,  in  which  the 
physical  and  the  coarse  are  no  less  humili- 
ating to  the  spirit  than  they  were  in  prose. 
But  this  fault  in  taste  is  not  essential  in 
the  method  of  realism ;  moreover,  some  al- 
lowance may  be  made  for  crudity  of  sub- 
ject as  well  as  of  style  in  so  bold  an  ex- 
periment. The  main  point  is  that  the 
new  poetry  inherits  its  style  from  a  prose 
ancestry  and  takes  its  methods  and  its 
subjects  from  the  tradition  of  the  novel; 
and  we  who  like  or  dislike  what  we  see  are 
none  the  less  witnessing  one  of  those  mu- 

[109] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

tations  by  which  from  time  to  time  litera- 
ture re-invigorates  itself,  pouring  old  wine 
into  new  bottles  or  new  wine  into  old  bot- 
tles. In  the  Elizabethan  period  an  im- 
mense amount  of  prose  material  was  con- 
verted into  poetic  drama;  a  hundred  years 
ago  Scott  took  romance  over  into  prose; 
now  the  new  poetry  is  transferring  to  verse 
the  brevity,  the  precision,  and  the  honesty, 
of  modern  prose  realism. 

II 

In  the  process  of  any  such  mutation  an 

artist  lays  himself  open  to  attack  from  the 

unsympathetic.  It  has  not  escaped  their 

critics  that  certain  of  the  new  poets  who 

are  now  much  advertised,  once  wrote  in 

the  old-fashioned  way  and  were  obscure; 

what  more  obvious  slur  upon  them,  then, 

than  to  suggest  that  they  have  cultivated 

eccentricity   out   of   desperation,   having 

[no] 


THE    NEW    POETRY 

failed  to  master  the  legitimate  art?  Walt 
Whitman  himself,  it  is  recalled,  wrote 
some  mediocre  verses  in  the  accepted 
rhythms  before  he  invented  his  wonderful 
recitative.  But  the  critic  will  hardly  raise 
this  reproach  unless  he  has  somewhat  lost 
his  head;  for  surely  an  artist  who  invests 
and  adopts  a  medium  suitable  to  his  gifts, 
is  not  a  knave  but  a  sensible  person,  per- 
haps a  genius.  Unfortunately,  the  new 
poet  rarely  hears  the  reproach  without 
also  losing  his  head,  his  favorite  retort  be- 
ing that  the  old  mediums  are  worn  out, 
and  only  the  uninventive  would  be  content 
with  them;  whereas,  for  those  to  whom 
they  are  natural,  the  old  mediums  will  re- 
main eternally  modern. 

The  unsympathetic  critic  and  the  exas- 
perated imagist  may  well  take  a  lesson  in 
good  sense  from  Whitman,  who  honored 

the  older  art  though  convinced  of  the  ne- 

[ni] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

cessity — for  him — of  the  new.  They 
might  well  consider  also  Browning's  very 
pertinent  account,  in  Pippa  Passes,  of  the 
great  artist  some  day  to  arrive:  "Since  his 
hand  could  manage  a  chisel,  he  has  prac- 
tised expressing  other  men's  Ideals;  and, 
in  the  very  perfection  he  has  attained  to, 
he  foresees  an  ultimate  failure:  his  un- 
conscious hand  will  pursue  its  prescribed 
course  of  old  years,  and  will  reproduce 
with  a  fatal  expertness  the  ancient  types, 
let  the  novel  one  appear  never  so  palpably 
to  his  spirit.  There  is  but  one  method  of 
escape:  confiding  the  virgin  type  to  as 
chaste  a  hand,  he  will  turn  painter  instead 
of  sculptor,  and  paint,  not  carve,  its  char- 
acteristics. .  .  .  Foolish  Jules!  and  yet, 
after  all,  why  foolish?  He  may — prob- 
ably will — fail  egregiously;  but  if  there 
should  arise  a  new  painter,  will  it  not  be 
in  some  such  way,  by  a  poet,  now,  or  a 

[112] 


THE    NEW    POETRY 

musician  (spirits  who  have  conceivea  ana 
perfected  an   Ideal  through  some   other 
channel),  transferring  it  to  this,  and  es- 
caping our  conventional  roads  by  pure  ig- 
norance of  them?"     Whatever  is  lost  in 
such  a  starting  afresh,  there  will  be  this 
great  advantage — provided,  as  Browning 
says,  that  we  do  not  fail  egregiously:  our 
originality  will  be  unfettered,  our  poetry 
will  be  more  vital,  the  life  we  know  will 
come  more  completely  into  the  grasp  of 
art.    Innovations  in  poetry  are  not  with- 
out precedent,  and  it  is  clear  that  they 
often  herald  a  renaissance,  whether  we  cite 
for  illustration  Dante's  use  of  the  vulgar 
tongue,  or  Wordsworth's  use  of  the  com- 
mon vocabulary,  or  Whitman's  use  of  free 
rhythms.    The  new  poets  may  fail  to  jus- 
tify their  departure  from  custom,  but  re- 
proach is  hardly  the  proper  greeting  for 
their  energetic  attempt. 

[113] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

It  ma3r  be  observed  that  Browning's 
ideal  painter  has  first  acquired  skill  in  an- 
other art,  and  therefore  has  earned  his 
right,  as  it  were,  to  spontaneous  utterance. 
The  defenders  of  free  verse  are  charged 
with  providing  a  dangerous  opportunity 
for  their  fellow  citizens  to  appear  in  print 
without  any  artistic  discipline  whatever. 
Anyone,  it  is  said,  can  write  free  verse. 
Perhaps  anyone  can ;  few  of  us,  certainly, 
have  refrained  from  trying,  and  the  edi- 
tors of  newspaper  columns  and  magazines 
seem  willing  to  air  the  attempts.  But  un- 
conscionable imitation  is  an  incident  to 
any  success  in  art.  Doubtless  the  new 
word-music  of  Petrarch  and  Dante  in 
Italian  encouraged  many  a  cheap 
rhymester,  who  had  neither  their  brains 
nor  their  training  in  Latin  versification, 
to  see  what  he  could  do  in  the  mother 
tongue;   certainly   Wordsworth's   use  of 

[114] 


THE    NEW    POETRY 

conversational  diction  showed  the  way  to 
a  swarm  of  unpoetical  folk  who  had 
neither  his  vision  nor  his  feeling;  and 
Whitman's  departure  from  formal  versi- 
fication may  be  held  responsible  for  vol- 
umes of  bald  prose  printed  with  one  sen- 
tence to  each  paragraph.  But  the  undis- 
ciplined in  art  are  never  likely  to  have  that 
store  of  ideas  which  Browning's  painter 
acquires  while  mastering  poetry  or  music 
or  sculpture;  and  we  may  be  sure  that 
oblivion  is  the  reward  of  poetasters  in  any 
style  who  have  nothing  to  say. 

Promiscuous  writers  of  free  verse  may 
annoy,  but  not  for  long;  those  who  are  fin- 
ally remembered  will  have  earned  their 
place  by  study  and  self-discipline.  In- 
deed, instead  of  censuring  the  imagists 
for  introducing  an  orgy  of  impromptu 
versifying,  we  might  urge  that  the  best  of 
them  have  too  lively  a  respect  for  their 

[115] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

literary  background.  They  have  perhaps 
got  less  clear  of  the  old  rhythms  than  they 
think ;  for  though  an  apparent  freedom  is 
in  their  lines,  their  own  reading  of  them  is 
haunted  by  ancient  metric  patterns,  often 
by  certain  echoes  of  Greek  and  Latin 
prosody.  To  the  unclassical  reader 
their  aim  must  seem  elusive,  but  those  of 
us  who  remember  enough  of  our  Greek  to 
appreciate  a  good  translation,  are  stirred 
with  subtle  memories  when  we  examine 
the  best  of  this  new  work.  We  do  not  see 
how  anyone  can  get  the  full  force  of — let 
us  say — the  Spoon  River  Anthology,  who 
has  never  read  the  Greek  Anthology — 
preferably  in  translation.  The  imagists, 
like  the  rest  of  us,  are  profoundly  in- 
debted to  Professor  Mackail.  Of  course, 
the  Greek  melic  poets,  to  whom  the  imag- 
ists refer  us,  composed  in  quite  orthodox 
meters,  but  in  faithful  and  dignified  trans- 

[116] 


THE    NEW    POETRY 

lation  they  have  much  of  the  effect  of  the 
new  free  verse.  We  have  all  observed  the 
same  effect  in  Lafcadio's  Hearn's  transla- 
tions of  Japanese  poetry,  which  we  are 
told  is  curiously  in  sympathy  with  imagist 
principles ;  we  have  observed  the  same  ef- 
fect in  the  innumerable  line  for  line  trans- 
lations of  Alcaic  or  Sapphic  stanzas  with 
which  British  scholarship  furnishes  us;  we 
have  observed  the  same  effect  in  those 
parts  of  Matthew  Arnold's  work  which 
are  most  intentionally  severe,  and  which 
often  seem  to  be  merely  class-room  trans- 
lations of  some  larger  Greek  poet.  In 
short,  for  those  who  have  undergone  the 
usual  academic  drill  in  the  classics  or  in 
any  other  language  than  their  own,  a  good 
translation  yields  an  insidious,  romantic 
pleasure,  a  precise  yet  tantalizing  indica- 
tion of  what  in  the  original  was  living  and 
organic;  and  those  who  have  the  original 

[in] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

in  mind  will  easily  attribute  its  vitality  to 
the  translation,  whereas  the  reader  who 
knows  only  the  translation  will  miss  a 
great  deal.  It  is  this  consciousness  of 
translation,  this  romance  of  second-hand 
expression,  which  the  imagists  seem  to  be 
cultivating;  we  might  say  that  the  origi- 
nals of  their  poems  never  get  written. 

Ill 

I  have  spoken  of  the  Spoon  River  An- 
thology, by  Edgar  Lee  Masters.  This 
book,  now  familiar  to  us  for  several  years, 
represents  better  than  any  other  what  the 
new  poets  strive  for;  indeed,  like  every 
book  of  great  vitality,  it  shows  already 
a  disposition  to  swallow  up  the  reputation 
of  other  works  in  its  kind,  and  of  other 
kinds  of  writing  by  its  author.  It  had  an 
immediate  success,  and  brought  Mr.  Mas- 

[118] 


THE    NEW    POETRY 

ters  an  inundation  of  praise.  He  was 
promptly  welcomed  by  The  New  York 
Times  as  "the  natural  child  of  Walt  Whit- 
man," an  honorable  but  not  discriminating 
appraisal — and  by  many  another  journal 
as  the  poet  of  Americanism.  On  the  other 
hand,  he  was  sharply  challenged  for  his 
chaotic  rhythms,  for  his  too  frank  sub- 
jects, for  the  bitterness  of  his  outlook,  and 
for  the  frequent  anticlimax  of  his  style. 
A  few  shrewd  critics,  detecting  the  novel- 
ist in  him,  compared  his  series  of  village 
portraits  to  the  "Comedie  Humaine." 
None,  so  far  as  I  know,  dwelt  on  the  obvi- 
ous fact  that  the  book  is  a  collection  of 
epitaphs,  not  of  poems,  and  that  with  one 
or  two  exceptions  the  epitaphs  follow  or 
parody  the  style  of  the  Greek  inscriptions ; 
so  that  the  severity  of  this  style  in  con- 
trast with  the  undignified  or  ridiculous 
substance  of  many  of  the  confessions,  pro- 

[119] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

duces  that  effect  of  irony,  almost  of  bit- 
terness, which  constitutes  for  most  read- 
ers the  distinct,  if  finally  somewhat  mo- 
notonous, appeal  of  the  book.  The  crit- 
ics might  have  added  that  the  method 
throughout  is  rhetorical,  not  poetic.  What 
simple  philosophy  the  inscriptions  as  a 
whole  convey,  is  not  insinuated  to  the  soul 
through  a  melody,  as  in  FitzGerald's 
Omar,  but  is  discharged  into  the  most  re- 
luctant heads  by  rhetorical  catapults. 
This  mortal  life  is  full  of  queer  changes 
and  chances,  thinks  the  poet;  therefore 
these  epitaphs  begin  nobly  and  then  drop 
us  into  bathos,  into  absurdity,  into  horror, 
or  they  begin  on  a  plane  of  disillusion  and 
then  jerk  us  up  into  a  poetic  mood.  Few 
books  are  so  exciting  to  read.  A  still  more 
searching  criticism  might  have  been  made, 
that  while  Mr.  Masters  calls  our  attention 
with  remarkable  power  to  the  physical  or 

[120] 


THE  NEW  POETRY 

material  facts  of  life,  he  too  seldom  in- 
cludes the  ideal  values  which  properly 
go  along  with  those  facts  and  which  are  at 
least  as  important  in  human  experience 
and  destiny.  This  criticism,  it  should  be 
noticed,  is  such  as  would  more  frequently 
concern  a  novelist  than  a  poet. 

But  whatever  has  been  or  might  be  said 
for  or  against  the  Spoon  River  Anthology , 
and  whether  it  be  the  work  of  an  imagist 
or  not,  it  is  easily  the  most  effective  prod- 
uct so  far  of  the  new  vitality  in  our  litera- 
ture. Among  its  other  services,  it  has 
cleared  the  air  for  American  verse;  after 
its  hard,  clean-cut  intelligence  the  vapor- 
ings  of  "Petit  the  Poet"  are  for  the  time 
being  at  least  self-condemned.  And  since 
Mr.  Masters,  like  the  novelist  he  essenti- 
ally is,  kept  a  consistent  point  of  view  in 
all  his  character-portraits,  it  seems  that 
our  volumes  of  verse  must  henceforth  pre- 

[121] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

tend  to  the  same  kind  of  unity,  no  longer 
serving  as  receptacles  for  cold  magazine 
poems  miscellaneously  gathered  up. 
While  the  influence  of  the  book  endures, 
our  poetry  is  likely  to  engage  itself  with 
studies  of  American  character,  whereas 
hitherto  it  rarely  approached  nearer  to 
the  facts  than  to  theorize  lyrically  as  to 
what  Americanism  should  be.  If  Mr. 
Masters  had  published  nothing  but  the 
Anthology,  I  should  have  added  that 
wherever  the  book  continued  its  influence, 
the  lyric  note  would  give  way  to  realistic 
painting;  but  in  his  later  volumes,  from 
Songs  and  Satires  to  Starved  Rock,  there 
is  promise  enough  that  contemporary 
poetry  may  keep  its  realism  and  regain  its 
singing  voice.  I  do  not  refer  to  those  or- 
thodox lyrics  in  regular  metres  with  which 
some  of  Mr.  Masters'  later  books  are  di- 
luted ;  we  must  think  them  early  work,  for 

[122] 


THE    NEW    POETEY 

some  unlucky  reason  resurrected.  I  refer 
rather  to  the  pieces  in  the  freer  rhythms, 
which  published  alone  would  have  made  a 
volume  far  more  important  than  the  Spoon 
River  Anthology ,  but  less  scandalously 
startling. 

Robert  Frost's  North  of  Boston  dates 
somewhat  earlier  than  the  appearance  in 
book  form  of  the  Spoon  River  Anthology, 
but  for  obvious  and  not  discreditable  rea- 
sons it  made  its  way  more  slowly.  The 
book  is  entirely  without  the  rhetorical 
brilliance  and  the  irony  of  Mr.  Masters, 
and  the  subjects  it  treats  of  are  fewer  and 
narrower;  yet  there  are  persons  who  con- 
sider it  the  most  solid  poetic  achievement 
of  our  day.  In  his  observation  and  in  his 
style  Mr.  Frost  constantly  suggests 
Wordsworth.  He  avoids  the  free  rhythms 
of  the  imagists,  not  apparently  because  \ 
he  cannot  use  them,  but  because  he  does 

[123] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

not  need  to,  since  the  Wordsworthian  con- 
versational line  affords  him  all  the  free- 
dom he  desires.  Like  Mr.  Masters,  he 
has  the  novelist's  point  of  view,  and  here, 
of  course,  he  departs  from  the  Words- 
worthian tradition;  he  studies  characters 
and  manners  for  their  own  sake,  and 
though  everything  he  writes  indicates  a 
deep  and  broad  human  sympathy,  he  per- 
mits himself  less  moralizing  or  philoso- 
phizing than  is  found  even  in  the  Spoon 
River  Anthology.  Occasionally  he  strikes 
out  a  haunting  line,  rarely  powerful  and 
rarely  obvious,  but  not  to  be  forgotten — 
like  the  first  line  and  the  last  in  the  vol- 
ume: "Something  there  is  that  does  not 
love  a  wall,"  and,  "With  the  slow  smoke- 
less burning  of  decay."  And  the  beauti- 
ful prologue  and  still  finer  epilogue  sug- 
gest that  the  low  poetic  temperature  of 
the  main  part  of  the  book  is  intentional, 

[124] 


THE    NEW    POETRY 

and  that  when  he  chooses  Mr.  Frost  can 
turn  pure  lyrist.  Indeed,  his  poetic 
equipment  is  in  its  way  far  more  subtle 
than  that  of  Mr.  Masters,  but  he  has  as 
yet  shown  no  such  range  of  observation, 
no  such  mental  vigor,  no  such  ability  to 
grip  the  attention,  and  it  remains  to  be 
seen  whether  he  can  handle  other  subjects 
than  those  in  his  book — country  incidents 
and  characters,  for  the  most  part  eccentric 
or  unusual.  The  style  of  the  Spoon  River 
Anthology  has  been  imitated  and  paro- 
died, but  not  its  content,  for  Mr.  Masters 
gets  his  subject  matter  out  of  his  own 
point  of  view,  which  cannot  easily  be  imi- 
tated. It  is  the  subjects,  however,  of 
North  of  Boston  which  have  invited  par- 
ody, for  Mr.  Frost  has  generally  selected 
material  which  needs  only  to  be  tran- 
scribed in  order  to  be  effective.  If  this  is 
to  be  his  permanent  method,  his  range 

[125] 


THE    KINDS     OF    POETRY 

may  be  small  and  his  contribution  finally 
negligible,  for  he  will  have  to  avoid  the 
obvious  things  that  lie  in  the  highway  of 
our  interest.  But  the  poem  which  he 
wisely  set  at  the  opening  of  his  volume, 
Mending  Wall,  a  noble  interpretation  of 
a  familiar  incident,  gives  assurance  of 
powers  not  yet  developed  in  him. 

Miss  Amy  Lowell  has  made  herself  the 
chief  apologist  for  imagism,  and  we  there- 
fore think  of  her  first  as  a  critic  and  as  an 
orator;  not  even  such  clever  books  as 
Sword  Blades  and  Poppy  Seeds  and  A 
Dome  of  Many -Colored  Glass  and  the  re- 
cent Pictures  of  the  Floating  World  could 
dwarf  her  reputation  as  a  theorist  and 
propagandist.  Without  her  aid  as  advo- 
cate, there  would  probably  have  been  no 
new  "school"  at  all — only  the  poetry  of 
Masters  and  Frost.  What  her  reputation 
would  have  been  had  she  confined  herself 

[126] 


THE    NEW    POETRY 

to  creative  writing,  probably  none  of  us 
is  impartial  enough  to  guess   correctly. 
The  defects  and  the  merits  of  her  verse 
are  singularly  obvious,  yet  a  mere  recital 
of  them  helps  us  little  towards  appraising 
her  ability.     She  writes  easily  in  the  new 
rhythms  and  awkwardly  in  the  old;  she 
has  little  knowledge  of  character,  in  the 
novelist's  sense;  she  has  little  interest,  it 
seems,  in  what  goes  on  in  modern  society ; 
she  is  the  most  literary  of  all  the  new 
school,  and  her  subjects  are  entirely  book- 
ish; she  seems  to  have,  finally,  no  special 
aptitude  for  the  lyric  or  for  narrative,  as 
we  can  see  clearly  from  such  labored  per- 
formances as  Guns  are  Keys.     On  the 
other  hand,  she  is  a  wit,  and  she  has  a  tal- 
ent for  monologue.    It  is  not  surprising, 
therefore,  that  her  best  poems,  in  spite 
of  their  imagist  intentions,  appeal  to  the 
ear  rather  than  to  the  visual  imagination, 

[127] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

and  one  lias  only  to  hear  her  read  them  to 
know  how  heautifully  sensitive  she  is  to 
the  spoken  phrase.  In  this  department 
she  has  rendered  American  verse  a  great 
service,  for  poets  always  need  to  be  re- 
minded, either  by  precept  or  by  an  attrac- 
tive example,  that  the  natural  phrase  is  a 
sacred  thing,  not  to  be  sacrificed  to  exi- 
gencies of  the  line  or  the  rhyme.  Of 
course  it  does  not  follow  that  we  need  sac- 
rifice the  line  or  the  rhyme  to  the  exigen- 
cies of  the  phrase.  But  Miss  Lowell's 
verse  and  her  reading  of  it  have  helped  to 
restore  to  contemporary  verse  firmness 
and  naturalness  of  phrase — or,  as  she  per- 
haps would  say,  of  cadence. 

In  fact,  her  insistence  upon  the  quality 
of  the  phrase  is  of  the  greatest  importance, 
and  is  sufficient  cause  for  the  attention 
she  has  deservedly  received.  The  cadence 
of  American  speech  is  no  longer  the  same 

[128] 


THE    NEW    POETRY 

as  that  of  English,  and  it  was  from  Eng- 
lish models  that  the  best  American  poets 
fifty  years  ago  learned  the  cadence  both 
of  their  speech  and  of  their  verse;  it  is 
not  surprising  therefore  that  to  the  Ameri- 
can ear  to-day  the  fall  of  Tennyson's  line, 
or  Lowell's,  or  Longfellow's,  sounds 
strange,  almost  foreign.  Our  average 
fellow-citizen  speaks  more  directly  now, 
with  less  subtlety  and  also  with  less  delay. 
Our  conversation  is  a  succession  of  ham- 
merstrokes,  not  links  of  sweetness  long 
drawn  out.  Whether  or  not  we  approve, 
this  is  the  fact,  and  we  need  not  wonder 
that  a  people  whose  talk  is  such  should  ask 
for  verse  which  preserves,  in  however  ele- 
vated a  form,  the  same  fashion  of  dis- 
course. In  this  point  at  least  the  younger 
generation  hail  Miss  Lowell  as  a  prophet 
of  their  sentiments;  she  quotes  for  them 
verse  which  sounds  American,  whatever  it 

[129] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

may  mean,  and  they  have  been  hungry  for 
verse  the  cadence  of  which  should  be  native 
to  their  ear. 

IV 

As  for  the  imagists  as  a  whole,  it  is  in- 
conceivable that  the  general  reader  should 
ever  have  found  them  perplexing,  had  not 
their  poems  been  introduced  and  accom- 
panied by  a  critical  defense  too  often  un- 
sound and  distracting.  I  do  not  myself 
know  who  belong  to  the  school  and  who 
do  not,  though  I  have  read  all  the  defini- 
tions of  Miss  Lowell  and  her  collaborators. 
To  me  the  new  poets  generally  consid- 
ered important  all  seem  eligible  as  imag- 
ists, and  I  would  include  Edward  Arling- 
ton Robinson,  who  was  studying  the  cad- 
ence of  American  speech  before  Miss 
Lowell  gave  her  attention  to  it.  Most  of 
us  first  heard  of  imagism  in  the  January 

[130] 


THE    NEW    POETRY 

number  of  Poetry,  1913,  where  a  London 
correspondent  of  the  magazine,  Ezra 
Pound,  had  this  to  say:  "The  youngest 
school  here  that  has  the  nerve  to  call  it- 
self a  school  is  that  of  the  Imagistes.  .  .  . 
Space  forbids  me  to  set  forth  the  pro- 
gramme of  the  Imagistes  at  length,  but 
one  of  their  watchwords  is  Precision,  and 
they  are  in  opposition  to  the  numerous 
and  unassembled  writers  who  busy  them- 
selves with  dull  and  interminable  effusions, 
and  who  seem  to  think  that  a  man  can 
write  a  good  long  poem  before  he  learns 
to  write  a  good  short  one,  or  even  before 
he  learns  to  produce  a  good  single  line." 
Had  the  theory  of  imagism  remained  so 
simple  and  so  sane,  there  could  have  been 
no  just  quarrel  with  it.  There  could  be 
little  objection  to  the  three  rules  of  imag- 
ism, as  formulated  by  F.  S.  Flint  in  a  later 
number   of   Poetry:   "1.      Direct    treat- 

[131] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

ment  of  the  'thing,'  whether  subjective  or 
objective.  2.  To  use  absolutely  no  word 
that  did  not  contribute  to  the  presentation. 
3.  As  regarding  rhythm:  to  compose  in 
sequence  of  the  musical  phrase,  not  in  se- 
quence of  a  metronome."  But  even  in 
these  innocent  rules,  two  tendencies  of 
later  imagistic  criticism  show  themselves — 
the  tendency  to  use  blind  phrases,  and  the 
tendency  to  ascribe  awful  shortcomings  to 
the  older  rhythms.  "To  compose  in  se- 
quence of  the  musical  phrase."  Does  that 
mean  the  same  thing  as  "to  compose  in  the 
musical  phrase?"  Have  we  been  puzzled 
by  some  words  that  "did  not  contribute  to 
the  presentation"  of  this  theory?  And 
what  English  poet,  save  George  Gas- 
coigne,  unknown  to  imagists,  needed  to  be 
told  not  to  compose  to  the  metronome?  In 
the  same  number  of  Poetry  the  London 
correspondent,  having  evidently  become 

[132] 


THE    NEW    POETRY 

heart  and  soul  devoted  to  the  school,  gives 
a  list  of  "Don'ts  by  an  Imagiste/'  a  com- 
bination of  platitudes  and  original  non- 
sense which  is  either  amusing  or  exasper- 
ating, according  to  your  temperament. 
The  first  advice  under  the  head  of 
"Rhythm  and  Rhyme"  begins:  "Let  the 
candidate  fill  his  mind  with  the  finest  ca- 
dences he  can  discover,  preferably  in  a 
foreign  language,  so  that  the  meaning  of 
the  words  may  be  less  likely  to  divert  his 
attention  from  the  movement." 

The  advice  to  translate,  the  advice  to 
take  counsel  of  the  contemporary  French 
poets,  which  this  critic  gives  freely,  is  in 
tune  with  Miss  Lowell's  statement,  in  the 
preface  to  her  Sword  Blades  and  Poppy 
Seeds,  that  she  owed  an  immense  debt  to 
the  French,  to  the  Parnassian  and  to  the 
later  groups.  Indeed  Miss  Lowell  finds 
it  difficult  to  speak  of  poetry  without  cit- 

[133] 


THE    KINDS     OF    POETRY 

ing  the  admirable  qualities  of  the  French 
and  the  general  shortcomings  of  the  An- 
glo-Saxon. She  also  finds  it  difficult  to 
cite  this  unfortunate  difference  without 
adding  an  elusive  illustration — elusive  at 
least  to  the  mere  English  or  American 
brain;  so  that  those  who  have  read  or 
heard  her  criticism  learn  to  expect  shortly 
after  any  reference  to  modern  French 
poetry,  a  depressing  sense  of  having  lost 
their  bearings.  To  illustrate  by  a  para- 
graph from  this  same  preface: 

"It  is  because  in  France,  to-day,  poetry 
is  so  living  and  vigorous  a  thing,  that  so 
many  metrical  experiments  come  from 
there.  .  .  .  The  poet  with  originality  and 
power  is  always  seeking  to  give  his  read- 
ers the  same  poignant  feeling  which  he  has 
himself.  To  do  this  he  must  constantly 
find  new  and  striking  images,  delightful 
and  unexpected  forms.     Take  the  word 

[134] 


THE    NEW    POETRY 

'daybreak/  for  instance.  What  a  remark- 
able picture  it  must  once  have  conjured 
up!  The  great,  round  sun,  like  the  yolk 
of  some  mighty  eggy  breaking  through 
cracked  and  splintered  clouds.  But  we 
have  said  'daybreak'  so  often  that  we  do 
not  see  the  picture  any  more;  it  has  be- 
come only  another  word  for  dawn." 

That  is:  because  poetry  is  vital  in 
France,  we  get  metrical  experiments  from 
the  French.  A  real  poet  writes  to  convey 
his  feeling  to  the  reader.  ( Exit  the  topic 
of  metrical  experiments.)  To  convey 
your  idea  to  your  reader,  you  must  get  a 
new  image.  (Enter  the  topic  of  images.) 
Take  "day-break"  for  instance.  (Exit 
the  French  entirely,  along  with  the  metri- 
cal experiments.)  Miss  Lowell  appar- 
ently thinks  that  the  sun  at  dawn  pops 
out,  great  and  round,  through  cracked  and 
splintered  clouds. 

[135] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

Since  Miss  Lowell  has  done  most  of 
the  pleading  for  imagism,  it  is  not  sur- 
prising that  though  she  is  sometimes  the 
least  effective  advocate  the  school  has,  she 
is  also  sometimes  the  hest.  To  her  is  com- 
monly attributed  the  excellent  preface  to 
the  anthology  called  Some  Imagist  Poets. 
The  principles  of  imagism,  she  there  tells 
us,  "are  not  new;  they  have  fallen  into 
desuetude.  They  are  the  essentials  of  all 
great  poetry,  indeed  of  all  great  litera- 
ture, and  they  are  simply  these : 

"1.  To  use  the  language  of  common 
speech,  but  to  employ  always  the  exact 
word,  not  the  nearly  exact,  nor  the  merely 
decorative  word. 

"2.  To  create  new  rhythms — as  the 
expression  of  new  moods — and  not  to 
copy  old  rhythms,  which  merely  echo  old 
moods.  We  do  not  insist  upon  'free  verse' 
as  the  only  method  of  writing  poetry.    We 

[136] 


THE    NEW    POETRY 

fight  for  it  as  for  a  principle  of  liberty. 
We  believe  that  the  individuality  of  a 
poet  may  often  be  better  expressed  in  free 
verse  than  in  conventional  forms.  In 
poetry,  a  new  cadence  means  a  new  idea. 

"8.  To  allow  absolute  freedom  in  the 
choice  of  the  subject.  .   .   . 

"4.  To  present  an  image  (hence  the 
name:  'Imagist').  We  are  not  a  school 
of  painters,  but  we  believe  that  poetry 
should  render  particulars  exactly  and  not 
deal  in  vague  generalities,  however  mag- 
nificent and  sonorous.  .   .   . 

"5.  To  produce  poetry  that  is  hard  and 
clear,  never  blurred  nor  indefinite. 

"6.  Finally,  most  of  us  believe  that 
concentration  is  of  the  very  essence  of 
poetry." 

Probably  any  good  craftsman  at  any 
stage  of  poetic  history  would  subscribe  to 
this  pronouncement,  if  allowed  to  define 

[137] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

the  terms  which  it  employs.  But  prob- 
ably a  mature  poet  would  also  observe  that 
these  excellent  rules,  like  most  which  the 
imagists  give  us,  have  this  trait  of  youth, 
that  they  operate  from  the  outside  inward. 
Acquire  new  cadences,  the  imagists  advise 
us,  so  that  you  may  express  a  new  idea; 
yet  if  we  have  the  new  idea  and  try  to 
give  it  sincere  expression,  it  is  hard  to  see 
how  we  shall  miss  a  new  rhythm.  The  ex- 
cellence of  Mr.  Masters  and  of  Mr.  Frost 
is  that  they  have  built  their  art  from  the 
inside  outward,  and  their  success  illus- 
trates once  more,  what  the  young  poet  will 
not  easily  learn,  that  a  large  audience 
waits  for  those  whose  heart  and  mind  com- 
pel them  to  speak.  If  the  new  poets  as- 
pire to  great  work,  they  will  take  heed  to 
their  subjects  as  well  as  to  their  technique; 
they  will  put  themselves  in  touch  with  the 
ideas  that  are  stirring  our  democracy,  and 

[138] 


THE    NEW    POETRY 

they  will  make  themselves  our  spokesmen. 
To  such  an  end  the  study  of  French  poetry 
will  aid  chiefly  the  French  poets.  In 
France  the  poets  have  access  to  many  in- 
tellectual groups,  and  can  at  any  time 
catch  early  glimpses  of  the  visions  which 
later  are  to  fire  the  whole  people.  In  this 
country  the  only  organized  seeding 
grounds  of  ideas  are  the  large  universities, 
and  for  academic  centres  our  poets  nowa- 
days have  some  contempt.  Yet  if  it  is 
to  go  far,  the  new  poetry  will  somehow 
associate  itself  for  mutual  sympathy  and 
interpretation,  with  every  vital  stream  of 
social  and  philosophical  thought.  The 
poetic  instruments  are  ready.  The  sub- 
jects lie  before  us.  But  the  readers  who 
now  wait  for  the  poets  have  had  too  long 
a  discipline  to  bestow  the  laurel  on  the 
mere  phrase-maker  or  on  the  unthought- 
ful. 

[139] 


SCHOLARSHIP  AND 
POETRY 


SCHOLARSHIP  AND  POETRY 


IT  is  our  habit  when  we  study  poetry 
to  study  it  somewhat  exclusively  from 
the  point  of  view  of  the  reader.  We 
counsel  the  reader  to  seek  in  the  great 
poems  not  an  historical  record  nor  a  philo- 
sophical doctrine  but  a  poetic  experience; 
but  in  either  case  we  usually  imply  that 
only  the  reader  has  a  relation  to  poetry 
and  that  the  only  kind  of  scholarship  of 
which  criticism  should  give  an  account  is 
the  scholarship  which  helps  us  to  admire 
what  the  poet  has  created.    But  the  poet 

[143] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

needs  a  scholarship  of  his  own  before  he 
can  create  at  all. 

If  criticism  has  not  paid  sufficient  at- 
tention to  this  kind  of  scholarship  which 
belongs  peculiarly  to  the  poet,  perhaps  it 
is  because  many  critics  believe  sincerely 
that  the  poet  should  not  be  a  scholar,  that 
much  learning  will  check  his  inspiration 
or  at  least  will  taint  his  song  with  book- 
ishness,  that  the  artist  is  likely  to  be  most 
happy  in  theme  and  in  manner  when  his 
emotions  play  freely  upon  life,  unpreju- 
diced by  the  feelings  other  men  have  had 
in  the  same  situation  and  unconstrained 
by  the  haunting  cadence  or  the  persistent 
accent  of  their  voices.     To  be  sure,  the 
critics  would  not  entertain  such  a  theory 
if  they  realized  the  difference  between  the 
scholarship  which  is  good  for  the  reader 
and  that  which  is  good  for  the  poet.    The 
knowledge  of  history  will  bring  the  reader 

[144] 


SCHOLARSHIP    AND    POETRY 

to  the  doorstep  of  the  poet  he  studies;  it 
will  enable  him  to  approach  old  poems  as 
though  he  were  contemporary  with  them; 
and  when  it  has  brought  him  to  the  same 
date  as  the  poem  and  to  the  same  back- 
ground as  the  poet  had,  the  possession  of 
a  philosophy  will  enable  him  to  enter  into 
the  poet's  thought.  Yet  there  is  no  rea- 
son why  the  poet  should  be  historian  or 
philosopher.  He  might  of  course  be  both ; 
Dante  and  Shakspere  and  Milton  were  to 
some  extent  historians  and  philosophers. 
But  the  scholarship  of  which  the  poet  sim- 
ply as  a  poet  has  need  is  the  knowledge 
and  the  command  of  his  language.  The 
reader,  since  he  sees  first  the  frame  and  the 
outer  flesh,  as  it  were,  of  poetry,  must  learn 
to  observe  that  inner  heart  of  it  which  is 
subject  to  no  evolution,  but  is  the  same 
always;  the  poet,  however,  who  begins 
with  an  inspiration  that  seems  to  him  im- 

[145] 


THE    KINDS    OF     POETRY 

mortal,  must  learn  to  speak  in  the  tongue 
of  his  day  and  plaee.  Like  other  artists 
he  must  be  master  of  his  medium. 

Let  us  add  that  by  language  should  be 
understood  far  more  than  words  and  far 
more  than  grammar.  The  poet  must  in- 
deed be  an  artist  in  words,  but  a  pedantic 
interest  in  his  vocabulary  will  without 
question  harm  him  rather  than  aid.  By 
language  let  us  understand  not  only  the 
sound  of  our  syllables  but  all  that  we  talk 
with  besides — those  familiar  stories, 
images  or  allusions,  those  memories  of 
typical  experience  and  of  characteristic 
action,  which  more  than  mere  words  estab- 
lish communication  between  men.  To 
make  ourselves  understood  at  all  it  is 
necessary  to  use  language  long  repeated; 
whatever  other  originality  an  artist  should 
have,  he  should  not  try  to  invent  a  new 
speech,  for  if  he  does  so  he  will  for  the 

[146] 


SCHOLARSHIP    AND    POETRY 

time  at  least  be  the  only  person  who  under- 
stands it.  How  often  primitive  man  must 
have  tried  his  earliest  syllables  and  must 
have  listened  to  the  elementary  grunts  and 
groans  of  his  neighbors  before  he  and  they 
were  quite  sure  what  the  inflection  and  the 
accent  meant.  Even  in  the  most  devel- 
oped language  we  need  a  setting  to  be 
quite  sure  of  our  exclamations.  The  first 
man  who  stubbed  his  toe  on  a  boulder 
may  have  said  "Ouch"  as  the  most  culti- 
vated philosopher  would  say  it  now,  but 
who  could  tell  whether  his  mental  state 
was  one  of  anger,  or  of  half  amusement, 
or  of  heroism  in  making  light  of  a  seri- 
ous hurt?  With  centuries  of  tradition  in 
any  civilized  tongue  we  are  not  always 
sure  what  such  expressions  really  convey, 
unless  we  know  the  speaker  and  under- 
stand the  incidents  in  which  he  has  ex- 
claimed— in   short,   unless   we   know   the 

[147] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

setting  of  his  emotions.  The  size  of  an 
artist's  audience,  whether  the  artist  be 
important  or  very  minor,  depends  upon  the 
carrying  power  of  the  language  he  uses, 
and  this  carrying  power  depends  among 
other  things  on  the  number  of  times  the 
language  has  been  used.  To  be  generally 
understood,  therefore,  language  must  be 
traditional,  and  art,  to  be  enjoyed  by  more 
people  than  the  artist,  must  have  and  must 
preserve  a  certain  continuity  in  the  gen- 
eral mind  of  the  race. 

If  poetry  begins  with  the  primitive 
sounds  of  speech  and  if  those  sounds  must 
be  repeated  an  infinite  number  of  times 
before  they  have  gathered  into  them- 
selves a  race  significance,  the  next  stage 
in  the  growth  of  poetry  may  be  illustrated 
by  those  human  episodes  which  in  their 
more  coherent  forms  we  call  folk-lore — 
brief    narrative    framings    of    attitudes 

[148] 


SCHOLARSHIP    AND    POETRY 

which  have  struck  the  attention  of  men. 
A  very  few  appeals  to  memory  are  often 
enough  to  indicate  character  and  to  call 
up  a  more  precise  portrait  of  our  experi- 
ence than  we  could  trust  to  the  single 
word.  Emerson  thought  that  the  founda- 
tion of  this  stage  of  poetry  lay  in  nature ; 
"the  proverbs  of  nations,"  he  says,  "con- 
sist usually  of  a  natural  fact,  selected  as  a 
picture  or  parable  of  a  moral  truth.  Thus : 
A  rolling  stone  gathers  no  moss;  A  bird 
in  the  hand  is  worth  two  in  the  bush;  A 
cripple  in  the  right  way  will  beat  a  racer 
in  the  wrong;  Make  hay  while  the  sun 
shines ;  'Tis  hard  to  carry  a  full  cup  even ; 
Vinegar  is  the  son  of  wine ;  The  last  ounce 
broke  the  camel's  back."  We  do  indeed 
use  nature  to  talk  with;  but  we  also  to  a 
much  greater  extent  convert  human  con- 
duct into  speech,  and  certain  aspects  of 
behavior  soon  become  a  kind  of  verbal 

[149] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

counter  with  which  to  reckon  the  char- 
acter of  our  fellows.  "When  he  began  to 
act  that  way,"  we  say,  "I  knew  what  kind 
of  man  he  was,"  or  "A  person  who  would 
do  that  would  rob  a  church."  In  the  street 
the  least  literary  of  us  is  still  talking  with 
these  faint  suggestions  of  narrative.  "It's 
like  taking  candy  from  a  child,"  we  hear 
the  passer-by  remark;  in  the  phrase  there 
is  already  a  plot. 

If  we  obviously  cannot  talk  at  all  with- 
out sounds,  it  is  just  as  true,  though  not 
perhaps  so  generally  recognized,  that  we 
can  have  no  important  poetry  without 
folk-lore  or  whatever  one  cares  to  call 
these  incipient  stories  which  men  make  up 
in  order  to  communicate  with  each  other. 
The  business  of  the  great  poet  is  to  com- 
municate with  his  fellow  men  by  using  this 
common  language  which  their  practice  has 
already  prepared  for  him.    However  new 

[150] 


SCHOLARSHIP   AND    POETRY 

may  be  the  message  he  brings,  he  must 
speak  the  language  they  understand.  In 
order  to  be  a  poet  at  all,  therefore,  he  must 
have  the  mastery,  not  only  of  words,  but 
of  what  is  even  more  important,  those  nar- 
rative elements  which  are  most  current  in 
the  consciousness  of  his  fellows,  and  he 
must  cultivate  the  tact  with  which  to  turn 
those  elements  to  a  new  meaning.  To- 
ward this  kind  of  scholarship,  as  I  said, 
criticism  too  seldom  directs  our  attention. 

II 

Yet  it  is  not  overrash  to  say  that  all  the 
great  poets  have  had  this  kind  of  scholar- 
ship; they  have  drawn  on  old  material, 
which  their  audience  knew  well,  and  by 
means  of  it  they  have  said  something  new. 
What  their  method  was  we  can  observe 
by  following  the  course  of  any  world- 
story  as  they  changed  it  and  rededicated  it. 

[151] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

The  story  of  Odysseus,  for  example, 
was  old  long  before  Homer  told  and 
changed  it.  In  the  folk-lore  of  the  Greeks 
Odysseus  seems  to  have  been  at  first  a  very 
tricky  man,  one  who  could  be  counted  on 
to  make  his  way  by  crafty  methods.  He- 
siod  tells  us  that  when  the  suitors  were 
wooing  Helen,  Odysseus  sent  her  no  gifts, 
believing  that  Menelaus  would  win  her 
anyway.  We  cannot  be  sure  that  this 
thrift  was  disapproved  in  the  first  stage 
of  the  legend ;  childish  strategy  of  this  sort 
has  in  other  instances  won  the  admiration 
of  simple  minds.  But  in  a  more  complex 
version  the  character  of  Odysseus  before 
Homer  ennobled  it  was  clearly  remem- 
bered by  the  Greeks  with  scorn  and  con- 
tempt, and  this  version  was  the  more  popu- 
lar. In  it  Odysseus,  the  trickster,  was 
contrasted  with  Palamedes,  the  truly  wise 
man.     Palamedes,  according  to  legend, 

[152] 


SCHOLARSHIP    AND    POETRY 

had  invented  certain  letters  of  the  alpha- 
bet ;  he  had  combined  in  a  convenient  form 
and  domesticated,  as  it  were,  the  luck  of 
mortal  existence  by  the  invention  of  dice; 
he  was  the  first  to  build  lighthouses;  he 
invented  certain  measures  and  scales  which 
came  into  general  use;  and  he  first  made 
the  discus,  and  developed  that  art  of 
throwing  it  which  to  the  Greeks  as  well 
as  to  us  typifies  their  physical  grace.  In 
short,  he  was  a  singularly  public-spirited 
genius,  and  his  direct  contributions  to  the 
welfare  of  the  community  had  in  them 
poetic  implications,  which  elevated  the 
memory  of  their  inventor.  Odysseus,  on 
the  other  hand,  invented  nothing  of  bene- 
fit to  mankind,  and  his  cleverness  usually 
served  him  best  at  those  moments  when  he 
wished  to  avoid  a  public  obligation.  When 
Menelaus  called  upon  the  other  suitors  to 
remember  their  oaths  and  come  to  the  res- 

[153] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

cue  of  Helen,  Odysseus  pretended  to  have 
gone  crazy,  and  to  prove  himself  mad  he 
began  to  plow  the  sea-shore  with  furious 
zeal.  It  was  Palamedes  who  unmasked 
the  trick,  by  setting  Telemachus,  the  in- 
fant child  of  Odysseus,  in  the  very  path  of 
the  frantic  oxen  and  the  sharp  plow. 
Odysseus  turned  the  oxen  aside,  thereby 
showing  that  he  had  his  wits  about  him. 
He  made  no  further  protest  against  tak- 
ing part  in  the  Trojan  expedition,  but  he 
plotted  revenge,  and  later,  as  one  of  the 
cyclic  poets  recorded,  he  caused  Pala- 
medes to  be  drowned  while  he  was  en- 
gaged in  fishing  off  the  coast  of  Troy. 
There  was  another  version  of  the  treach- 
ery; Odysseus  was  said  to  have  placed 
Trojan  gifts  in  the  tent  of  Palamedes, 
and  to  have  persuaded  the  Greeks  that 
the  wise  inventor  was  in  communication 
with  Priam,  so  that  they  stoned  the  inno- 

[154] 


SCHOLARSHIP    AND    POETRY 

cent  man  to  death  for  a  spy.  This  is  the 
story  as  Ovid  remembered  it  in  the  Meta- 
morphoses. 

Homer  for  some  reason  chose  to  take 
another  view  of  the  character  of  Odysseus. 
Perhaps  he  had  no  need  in  his  epics  for 
two  rivals  in  shrewdness.  At  all  events, 
he  suppressed  entirely  the  legend  of  Pala- 
medes,  never  even  mentioning  the  name 
of  that  hero,  and  he  imagined  Odysseus 
as  a  noble  character,  admirable  in  his  be- 
havior as  a  warrior,  long-suffering  in  his 
wanderings,  and  by  his  heroic  endurance 
deserving  well  the  brilliant  restoration  of 
his  fortunes  on  his  return.  Palamedes  lin- 
gered for  a  while  in  the  race-memory  of 
the  Greeks  as  the  type  of  magnanimity 
done  to  death  by  meanness ;  one  of  the  lost 
plays  of  Euripides  took  him  for  its  theme. 
But  the  genius  of  Homer  sufficed  to  es- 
tablish Odysseus  permanently  in  his  career 

[155] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

as  romantic  hero,  and  his  earlier  reputa- 
tion gradually  faded  away. 

The  poets  who,  following  Homer,  com- 
pleted the  story  of  Troy  and  of  the  Greek 
heroes,  were  reluctant,  it  seems,  to  let  the 
adventures  of  Odysseus  end  in  a  quiet  old 
age  in  Ithaca ;  so  inquisitive  a  nature,  with 
so  long  a  habit  of  wandering,  could  hardly 
be  content  with  a  sedentary  life.  His  ex- 
periences were  continued,  therefore,  in  two 
ways — he  was  represented  as  enjoying 
new  adventures,  and  as  suffering  the  retri- 
bution, as  it  were,  of  former  ones.  The 
poem  called  the  Telegony  told  how  he  be- 
came restless  after  a  while,  and  how,  mak- 
ing some  excuses  to  Penelope,  he  sailed 
to  the  island  of  Thesprotis,  tarried  there 
for  some  time,  and  was  even  wedded  to 
the  queen  of  the  country.  This  episode, 
an  obvious  echo  of  the  sojourn  with  Circe 
or  with  Calypso,  was  feeble  enough  as  a 

[156] 


SCHOLARSHIP    AND    POETRY 

prolongation  of  the  legend,  and  would 
hardly  draw  our  attention  now,  if  a  greater 
poet  than  the  author  of  the  Telegony  had 
not  revived  the  idea  that  after  a  brief  stay 
in  Ithaca  Odysseus  once  more  took  ship. 
The  Telegony  gave  also  an  account  of  the 
wanderer's  death.  Hesiod  says  that  when 
Odysseus  had  lingered  in  Circe's  halls, 
she  had  borne  him  three  sons,  one  of  whom 
was  Telegonus.  The  author  of  the  Tele- 
gony, adapting  an  old  situation  familiar 
in  folk-lore  and  known  to  modern  readers 
in  the  story  of  Sohrab  and  Rustum,  of 
Cuchulain  and  Conloach,  told  how  Tele- 
gonus grew  up  and  at  last  went  forth  to 
seek  his  father,  and  how,  arriving  at  Ith- 
aca, unrecognized  and  without  means  of 
recognizing  the  aged  king,  he  accidentally 
met  him,  got  into  a  quarrel  with  him,  and 
Oedipus-like  killed  him.  What  color  the 
poet  gave  the  story  we  do  not  know,  since 

[157] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

the  plot  here  recounted  survived  only  in 
the  summaries  of  literary  historians.  Evi- 
dently it  made  no  impression  on  the  popu- 
lar imagination,  and  for  hundreds  of  years 
Odysseus  remained  what  Homer  had  made 
him. 

It  was  Dante  who  next  developed  the 
story.  He  also  was  persuaded  that  Odys- 
seus did  not  remain  at  home  after  the  re- 
turn to  Ithaca.  In  the  twenty-sixth  canto 
of  the  Inferno  Ulysses  and  Diomed  ap- 
pear among  the  Evil  Counsellors,  and 
Ulysses  tells  how  he  died.  Neither  love 
for  his  son,  he  says,  nor  love  for  his  father, 
nor  the  love  he  owed  Penelope,  could  over- 
come his  ardor  to  know  more  of  the  world, 
of  human  vice  and  virtue;  therefore  he 
put  forth  to  sea  in  a  single  ship  with  the 
few  old  comrades  left,  and  they  came  to 
the  narrow  waters  where  Hercules  had  set 
up  his  pillars,  that  men  might  not  venture 

[158] 


SCHOLARSHIP    AND    POETRY 

beyond.  There  Ulysses  appealed  to  his 
fellows,  in  the  brief  twilight  of  life  remain- 
ing, not  to  deny  themselves  knowledge  of 
the  uninhabited  world  behind  the  sun. 
"Remember  from  what  you  come;  you 
were  not  made  to  live  like  beasts,  but  to 
follow  virtue  and  knowledge."  They  then 
became  so  eager  for  the  voyage,  that  he 
could  hardly  have  checked  them,  and 
turning  toward  the  dawn  they  pursued 
their  foolish  flight;  till  there  appeared  to 
them  a  mountain,  the  highest  they  had 
ever  seen,  and  from  this  new  land  a  tem- 
pest arose,  which  sunk  the  ship. 

Dante  does  not  mean  to  approve  of  this 
quest  of  Ulysses ;  he  makes  the  repentant 
spirit  call  it  himself  a  "foolish  flight."  He 
does  not  otherwise  intend  that  Ulysses 
should  have  our  admiration.  Without  any 
reference  to  the  old  story  of  Palamedes, 
the  Italian  poet  is  the  champion  of  Rome, 

[159] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

and  to  him  Ulysses  and  Diomed  would 
naturally  seem  evil  counsellors;  he  says 
specifically  that  their  torments  in  hell  are 
for  their  treachery  in  the  matter  of  the 
wooden  horse,  for  their  forcing  Achilles 
into  the  Trojan  war  and  so  to  his  death, 
and  for  their  theft  of  the  image  of  Pallas, 
the  loss  of  which  made  it  possible  for  Troy 
to  fall.  The  advice  to  wander  once  more 
was  only  the  last  evil  counsel  which  Odys- 
seus gave.  But  in  spite  of  this  prejudice 
Dante,  true  poet,  himself  a  tragic  wan- 
derer, makes  Odysseus  speak  with  a  noble 
accent  when  he  admonishes  his  companions 
to  remember  from  what  they  came — not 
to  live  like  beasts  but  to  follow  virtue  and 
knowledge. 

"Considerate  la  vostra  semenza: 
fatti  not  foste  a  viver  come  bruti, 
ma  per  sequir  virtute  e  conoscenza. ' ' 

[160] 


SCHOLARSHIP    AND    POETRY 

These  are  the  lines  in  Dante's  account  of 
Odysseus  that  have  touched  modern  sen- 
timent, and  have  seemed  to  modern  poets 
worthy  of  expansion.  It  is  not  without 
significance  that  in  Alan  Seeger's  beauti- 
ful rendering  of  this  canto  Dante's  con- 
demnation of  the  quest  shrinks  to  nothing; 
the  "folle  volo"  is  not  translated  at  all. 
Thought  he  worked  from  the  Italian  text, 
the  young  American  poet  was  really  echo- 
ing Tennj'son's  Ulysses,  in  which  Dante's 
phrase  of  the  following  of  knowledge  is 
made  to  illuminate  modern  horizons.  In 
Tennyson,  for  a  while  at  least,  this  old 
world-story  of  Odysseus  becomes  once 
more  fixed  as  a  part  of  our  language;  by 
these  changes  at  the  hands  of  scholar- 
poets,  the  legend  of  trickery  and  treach- 
ery has  been  transmuted  into  the  image  of 
a  long-memoried  race  still  in  the  search  for 
truth — 

[161] 


THE    KINDS     OF-  POETRY 

this  grey  spirit  yearning  in  desire 
To  follow  knowledge  like  a  sinking  star 
Beyond  the  utmost  bound  of  human  thought. 


Ill 

The  story  of  Prometheus  has  had  per- 
haps an  even  more  distinguished  experi- 
ence in  literature  than  that  of  Odysseus, 
though  it  can  be  somewhat  more  briefly 
told.  Hesiod  says  that  the  Titans,  the 
"Strainers,"  were  so  called  because  they 
strained  after  the  power  of  the  gods,  and 
in  the  earliest  version  of  the  story  Prome- 
theus, the  greatest  of  the  Titans,  was  sim- 
ply a  kind  of  tricky  Odysseus  who  carried 
on  by  his  wits  a  prolonged  and  disastrous 
warfare  against  Zeus.  He  began  by  de- 
ceiving the  god  in  the  first  partition  of  the 
sacrifices.  Having  slain  an  ox,  he  placed 
in  one  pile  the  savoury  meat  covered  with 

[1621 


SCHOLARSHIP   AND    POETRY 

the  skin  and  in  another  the  skeleton  cov- 
ered with  the  mere  fat ;  and  he  then  asked 
Zeus  which  portion  should  helong  to  the 
gods.  Zeus  rather  greedily  selected  the 
fat  pile,  and  discovered  later  than  he  had 
done  what  Prometheus  wished  him  to  do. 
In  revenge  he  withheld  from  earth  alto- 
gether the  gift  of  fire.  Prometheus  then 
managed  to  steal  the  fire  from  heaven  and 
bring  it  back  to  men.  Zeus  then  had  Pan- 
dora created  with  her  fatal  gifts,  and  sent 
her  into  the  world  to  be  the  ruin  of  man- 
kind. However  the  fact  seems  prettily 
disguised,  the  legend  meant  that  in  order 
to  punish  Prometheus  Zeus  created 
woman  to  be  the  pest  of  man  henceforth. 
Prometheus  himself  was  bound  to  the 
crag.  Later  stories  told  how  he  was  re- 
leased from  his  torture  bv  Heracles. 

This  myth  in  its  early  form  laid  equal 
stress  upon  the  disposition  of  the  sacri- 

[163] 


THE    KINDS    OP    POETRY 

fices,  upon  the  stealing  of  the  fire  from 
heaven,  and  upon  the  creation  of  Pandora. 
It  was  the  genius  of  Aeschylus  that  he  em- 
phasized in  the  storj'  the  stealing  of  the 
fire.  His  great  play  Prometheus  Bound 
made  the  Titan,  once  for  all,  the  image  of 
those  saviours  of  mankind  who  scale  even 
the  heights  of  heaven  for  the  good  of  the 
race.  So  far  as  I  know,  no  other  poet  has 
ever  elevated  a  common  legend  by  selec- 
tion so  simple  to  a  meaning  so  sublime. 
From  the  day  of  the  Greek  dramatist  un- 
til now  European  literature  has  spoken 
through  the  image  of  the  Titan  when  it 
would  express  revolutionary  and  humane 
ideals.  No  one  has  attempted  since 
Aeschylus  to  alter  the  character  of  Prome- 
theus; later  poets  have  occupied  them- 
selves with  the  secret  of  his  deliverance, 
explaining  how  he  did  at  last  get  free 
from  the  crag.    It  was  not  in  the  temper 

[164] 


SCHOLARSHIP    AND    POETRY 

of  modern  times,  at  least,  to  account  for 
this  deliverance  solely  by  the  advent  of 
Heracles.  Rather  it  seemed  necessary  to 
place  the  secret  of  his  rescue  in  the  logic 
of  his  own  character.  It  would  be  super- 
fluous now  to  discuss  in  detail  the  many 
beautiful  versions  of  the  deliverance  of 
Prometheus,  since  George  Edward 
Woodberry  has  studied  them  at  length 
for  us  in  that  rare  book  of  his,  The  Torch. 
From  more  recent  literature  might  be 
added  other  illustrations  of  this  develop- 
ment of  folk-lore  and  legend  into  the  ma- 
ture language  of  poetry.  The  English 
race  has  often  expressed  itself  through  the 
character  of  King  Arthur.  He  is  one  per- 
son in  Malory,  another  in  Spenser,  and 
quite  another  in  Tennyson,  to  take  the 
three  main  instances ;  and  in  each  case  his 
story  is  made  to  indicate  what  that  per- 

ticular  age  had  to  say.     We  are  not  al- 
lies] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

ways  quick,  perhaps,  to  observe  the  im- 
mense difference  between  these  versions. 
In  Tennyson,  for  example,  when  Arthur 
bids  farewell  to  Guinevere  in  an  austere, 
beautifully-worded  declaration  of  his  own 
virtues  and  of  her  errors,  we  take  it  for 
granted  perhaps  that  Arthur  always  loved 
Guinevere  above  everything  else  in  the 
world,  and  that  his  relation  to  her,  in  all 
histories  of  him,  was  the  most  precious 
he  recognized.  Unless  we  are  aware  of 
the  immense  difference  between  chivalry 
before  Spenser  and  .chivalry  after  him,  we 
are  startled  to  come  on  the  terms  with 
which  Arthur  in  Malory's  book  laments 
over  Launcelot  and  Guinevere,  dismissing 
the  loss  of  his  queen  as  a  minor  misfor- 
tune, and  spending  his  chief  tears  on 
Launcelot.  "Alas  that  ever  I  bare  crown 
upon  my  head,  for  now  have  I  lost  the 
fairest  fellowship  of  noble  knights  that 

[166] 


SCHOLARSHIP    AND    POETRY 

ever  held  Christian  king  together.  Alas, 
my  good  knights  be  slain  away  from  me; 
now  within  these  two  days  I  have  lost 
forty  knights,  and  also  the  noble  fellow- 
ship of  Sir  Launcelot  and  his  blood,  for 
now  I  may  never  hold  them  together  no 
more  with  my  worship.  Alas,  that  ever 
this  war  began.  .  .  .  Wit  ye  well,  my 
heart  was  never  so  heavy  as  it  is  now,  and 
much  more  I  am  sorrier  for  my  good 
knights'  loss  than  for  the  loss  of  my  fair 
queen,  for  queens  I  might  have  enow,  but 
such  a  fellowship  of  good  knights  shall 
never  be  together  in  no  company;  and 
now  I  dare  say,"  said  King  Arthur,  "that 
there  was  never  Christian  king  held  such 
a  fellowship  together,  and  alas  that  Sir 
Launcelot  and  I  should  be  at  debate." 

It  is  not  necessary  here  to  recall  Shak- 
spere's  habitual  use  of  old  material  for 
the  plots  of  his  dramas;  in  the  kind  of 

[167] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

scholarship  proper  to  a  poet  he  was  one 
of  the  most  scholarly  children  of  the 
muses,  who  were  themselves,  according  to 
the  Greek  myth,  the  children  of  memory. 
It  was  his  habit  to  make  his  play  always 
on  some  theme  already  widely  diffused, 
but  to  transmute  the  old  story  into  the 
more  exquisite  experience  which  he  alone 
could  imagine.  To  compare  Macbeth  in 
the  chronicle  with  Macbeth  in  the  play, 
or  the  Romeo  and  Juliet  of  Arthur 
Brooke  with  the  young  lovers  of  the  same 
name  now  dear  to  all  who  read,  is  to  won- 
der first  at  the  closeness  with  which  Shaks- 
pere  follows  his  material,  and  in  the  sec- 
ond place,  at  the  extraordinary  originality 
of  what  he  says  with  it.  He  would  be  bet- 
ter understood  if  we  remembered  that  for 
him  the  plot  itself  was  a  part  of  the 
language  with  which  he  portrayed  human 
nature,  and  that  the  changes  he  makes  in 

[168] 


SCHOLARSHIP    AND    POETRY 

an  old  story  are  but  as  a  novelty  of  accent 
on  a  familiar  word.  To  master  his  whole 
intention  we  must  therefore  be  ourselves 
somewhat  scholarly  in  the  language  he 
employs;  sometimes  we  must  know  what 
was  the  earlier  version  of  the  plot  before 
we  can  quite  see  the  character  he  would 
portray.  Many  actresses  play  Viola  in 
Twelfth  Night  as  if  she  were  somewhat 
melancholy;  the  shadow  of  her  shipwreck 
and  the  possible  loss  of  her  brother  ap- 
parently suggest  to  them  that  she  had  in 
her  some  tendency  to  brood  upon  fate. 
Aside  from  the  episode  of  the  shipwreck, 
however,  nothing  in  the  drama  would  sug- 
gest that  she  was  otherwise  than  light- 
hearted,  witty,  and  life-loving — a  close 
cousin  to  Rosalind,  though  with  her  own 
individuality.  Unless  one  knows  some- 
thing of  the  story  before  Shakspere  used 
it,  the  shipwreck  engages  more  of  our 

[169] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

sympathy  than  it  deserves.  The  earlier 
version  is  of  a  girl  who  for  love  of  the 
Duke,  of  whom  she  has  heard,  goes  to  his 
country  disguised  as  a  boy,  and  takes 
service  with  him,  under  the  name  of  her 
own  twin  brother.  From  Shakspere's  de- 
velopment of  his  sources  in  other  plays, 
we  are  assured  that  his  usual  purpose  in 
altering  a  plot  is  to  refine  or  spiritualize 
some  character ;  hero  or  villain  in  his  treat- 
ment becomes  more  deeply  penetrated 
with  mind  than  before.  The  Viola  he  con- 
ceived of  could  go  through  the  other  ex- 
periences of  the  original  story,  but  she 
would  not  set  out  with  the  crude  resolve 
to  look  up  the  eligible  young  man  she  had 
heard  of.  He  therefore  brings  her  to 
Illyria  by  accident,  and  in  his  time  ship- 
wreck was  a  familiar  accident.  The 
opening  of  the  play,  therefore,  is  not  to  be 
understood  as  a  vision  of  sudden  death, 

[170] 


SCHOLARSHIP    AND    POETRY 

remembered  sensitively  by  a  feminine  De 
Quincey ;  it  is  simply  as  though  the  story- 
teller began,  "Now  Viola  happened  to 
arrive  in  Illyria,  where  lived  a  certain 
Duke." 

The  same  poetic  scholarship  can  be  ob- 
served in  more  modern  instances,  and  not 
exclusively  in  the  narrative  or  dramatic 
poets.  Burns  and  Wordsworth  are  as 
good  examples  as  Shakspere,  in  spite  of 
the  general  belief  on  the  part  of  their  most 
devoted  readers  that  their  inspiration  was 
not  from  books  but  from  nature  without 
and  from  their  own  hearts  within.  Words- 
worth thought  we  might  get  moral  wis- 
dom from  an  impulse  of  the  vernal  wood ; 
the  theory  is  not  impaired  by  the  patent 
fact  that  he  often  got  material  for  his 
poems  from  what  others  had  written — 
from  his  sister's  diary,  from  books  of 
travel,  from  other  poets.    Like  Shakspere 

[171] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

and  Homer  and  all  the  artists,  whatever 
their  degree,  he  made  the  old  material  ex- 
press something  personal  and  original 
with  him;  like  them  also,  he  never  tried 
to  invent  a  new  experience  of  life  nor  a 
new  language.  His  lines  To  a  Cuckoo 
are  not  less  beautiful  because  they  are  a 
rewriting  of  Michael  Bruce's  poem,  nor 
The  Solitary  Reaper  less  original  because 
it  is  taken,  in  some  lines  word  for  word, 
from  a  sentence  in  Thomas  Wilkinson's 
Tour  in  Scotland,  nor  the  Ode  on  the  In- 
timations of  Immortality  less  majestic  be- 
cause Wordworth  had  studied  Henry 
Vaughan's  Retreat.  Of  Burns  the  same 
thing  can  be  said.  He  was  saturated  with 
Scottish  song  and  folk-lore,  and  the  care- 
less readers  who  detect  in  Duncan  Gray, 
or  My  heart  is  sair,  or  Comin  thro'  the  rye 
nothing  but  the  improvisings  of  a  natural 
poet,  do  not  know  Burns.     There  is  no 

[172] 


SCHOLARSHIP   AND    POETRY 

such  thing  as  a  natural  poet,  if  by  natural 
we  mean  without  art;  for  all  art  is  con- 
tinuous in  its  language,  however  spontane- 
ous in  its  impulse,  and  a  poet  who  was  ig- 
norant of  the  tradition  prepared  for  him, 
or  who  did  not  use  it,  would  be  reduced 
to  the  same  meagerness  of  expression,  in 
so  far  as  his  audience  is  concerned,  as  man 
experienced  in  the  childhood  of  the  race, 
until  some  more  complex  brain  began  to 
utter  itself  in  new  sounds — sounds  novel 
to  its  own  ears  and  incomprehensible  to 
others. 

Not  Browning  himself,  our  modern- 
seeming  psychologist,  who  takes  his 
themes  so  obviously  from  the  life  around 
him,  is  independent  of  traditional  lan- 
guage. He  was  more  than  scholarly,  he 
was  antiquarian  in  his  search  for  old 
stories  with  which  to  say  new  things;  in- 
deed, the  material  out  of  which  he  made 

[173] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

his  language  was  often  not  only  old  but 
unfamiliar,  so  that  even  when  his  thought 
was  not  difficult,  his  expression  of  it  fre- 
quently was.  Fra  Lippo  Lippi  might  be 
compared  with  Landor's  Filippo  Lippi 
and  Eu  genius  IV,  in  the  Imaginary  Con- 
versations, if  one  needed  an  example  of 
what  Browning  drew  from  his  predeces- 
sors. The  comparison  might  remind  us 
also  what  his  debt  was  to  Landor  for  other 
things  than  this  one  character.  Landor 
taught  him  especially  the  method  of  psy- 
chological dialogue.  But  what  did  Lan- 
dor not  teach,  to  a  host  of  nineteenth  cen- 
tury poets,  from  Southey  to  Swinburne! 
Himself  unusually  learned  in  poetic  ma- 
terial, he  was  rarely  able  to  say  with  it  a 
message  that  the  general  reader  could  ap- 
preciate; but  the  poets  understood  him, 
and  through  them  his  language  and  much 
of  his  content  has  been  spread  abroad. 

[174] 


SCHOLARSHIP    AND    POETRY 

We  do  not  yet  recognize  as  perhaps  some 
day  we  shall,  how  variously  he  enriched 
modern  English  literature. 

IV 

If  folk-lore,  or  a  body  of  legend  and 
stored-up  experience,  must  be  diffused  in 
a  nation  before  there  can  be  a  literature, 
it  is  not   surprising  that  poetry  in  the 
United  States  is  still  an  undeveloped  art. 
Not  undeveloped,  perhaps;  it  would  be 
fairer  to  say  that  its  development  is  ar- 
rested.    We  formerly  had  for  a  time  a 
common  literary  inheritance,  understood 
by  people  of  average  education.     Now, 
however,  we  are  become  a  nation  of  many 
ancestries — which  in  art  means  of  no  an- 
cestry at  all.     Those  Americans  whose 
heritage   is   British   can   understand   the 
poet  who  speaks  in  the  language  of  Eng- 
lish poetry;  those  whose  race-memory  is 

[175] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

Latin,  or  Slavic,  or  Oriental,  can  follow 
the  stories  of  their  particular  groups;  but 
no  group  is  likely  to  be  at  home  in  the  tra- 
dition of  the  other,  and  since  a  natural 
good-will  suggests  that  we  do  not  talk 
too  much  of  things  our  neighbor  does  not 
understand,  we  are  impelled  not  to  use  at 
all  the  old  material  of  poetry.    There  still 
might  be  for  many  readers  in  this  coun- 
try, as  there  is  for  European  readers,  a 
kind  of  international  language  of  poetry 
derived  from  the  classics;  we  are  not  yet 
so  far  away  from  our  Latin  and  Greek, 
once  the  language  of  all  poets,  that  we 
cannot  use  an  old  story  of  Athens  or 
Rome,  to  express  some  new  idea.     No 
English  poem  in  recent  years  is  more  mod- 
ern   in    feeling    than    Stephen    Phillips' 
Marpessa  or  his  Christ  in  Hades,  nor  does 
any  French  poet  in  the  last  fifty  years  ex- 
press a  larger  share  of  the  modern  spirit 

[176] 


SCHOLARSHIP    AND    POETRY 

than  Auguste  Angellier  in  his  volumes 
Dans  la  Lumiere  Antique.     But  within 
the  United  States  a  prejudice  has  grown 
against    all    poetic    tradition,    therefore 
against  the  classic.     Our  democratic  im- 
pulse to  speak  of  nothing  which  our  neigh- 
bor cannot  understand  is  leading  us  fast 
to  assume  that  our  neighbor  can  under- 
stand very  little,  and  the  mere  sight  of  a 
Greek   or   Roman  name   in   a   poem   is 
enough  to  frighten  off  the  majority  of  re- 
viewers and  readers.    The  poet,  therefore, 
who  writes  in  the  poetic  terms  of  any  na- 
tionality now  represented  in  the  United 
States  is  likely  to  limit  his  audience  to  his 
fellow-nationals,  and  the  poet  who  uses 
what  used  to  be  the  lingua  franca  of  poetry 
by  transforming  familiar  classic  myth  into 
a  modern  story,  runs  the  risk  of  estranging 
all  readers,  whatever  their  origin. 

The  obvious  remedy  would  seem  to  be 

[177] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

to  encourage  the  growth  of  American 
legend  and  to  use  in  our  poetry  the  myths 
we  already  have.  Until  very  recently, 
however,  there  has  been  no  great  disposi- 
tion to  do  this;  in  fact  many  of  the  new 
poets  have  embarked  resolutely  on  an- 
other policy,  which  however  mistaken  is 
undoubtedly  sincere,  and  which  is  sug- 
gested by  the  predicament  in  which  the 
American  poet  finds  himself  without  a 
ready  language  familiar  to  his  audience. 
These  new  writers  of  whom  I  speak  have 
attempted  in  theory  to  revitalize  the  words 
and  the  images  of  poetry;  they  have  at- 
tempted to  observe  more  sincerely  the 
world  about  them  as  it  is,  and  their  own 
sensations  and  emotions  as  they  have  them. 
They  have  tried  to  omit  as  far  as  possible 
what  might  be  called  the  attendant  acci- 
dents of  experience ;  they  would  give  us  in 
every  poem  the  heart  of  the  matter.    To 

[178] 


SCHOLARSHIP   AND    POETRY 

this  end  they  have  striven  for  conciseness, 
brevity  and  clarity.  It  would  be  a  stupid 
kind  of  critic,  no  matter  how  devoted  he 
was  to  older  manners  and  poetry,  who 
would  not  recognize  and  applaud  the  mo- 
tives of  this  young  school.  But  it  would 
be  stupid  also  not  to  observe  that  in  the 
pursuit  of  their  ideal  these  poets,  instead  of 
revitalizing  their  art,  are  simply  retracing 
the  history  of  poetic  language  back  to  its 
aboriginal  meagerness.  Language  began, 
let  us  repeat,  in  brief  personal  utterances 
understood  only  by  the  speaker;  it  devel- 
oped as  the  frequent  repetition  of  these 
sounds  taught  the  speaker  himself  and  his 
hearers  to  attach  meanings  to  them.  It 
developed  still  further  as  the  meanings  of 
words  expanded  into  episodes  of  common 
experience — the  larger  language  of 
poetry.  Now  that  we  are  destitute  of  this 
larger  language,  the  new  poets  of  whom  I 

1179] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

speak,  trying  to  find  the  specific  word  for 
each  idea  and  sensation,  seeking  clarity  as 
they  understand  it,  have  stripped  the  noun 
bare  of  its  adjective  and  the  verb  of  its 
adverb,  and  as  far  as  possible  have  omitted 
all  but  those  words  whose  reverberations 
may  suggest  the  inmost  quality  of  their 
message.  The  result  of  this  practice  is 
obvious  in  the  verse  which  appears  now  in 
most  of  our  magazines;  the  same  result 
shows  itself  in  much  modern  painting  and 
in  some  modern  music.  You  read  the 
poem  and  perhaps  admire  some  parts  of 
it  more  than  others,  since  those  parts  are 
clearer  to  you,  or  you  find  difficulty  in 
making  quite  sure  what  any  part  means. 
When  the  language  of  poetry  was  devel- 
oping toward  the  hope  of  complete  com- 
munication between  man  and  man,  the  con- 
fession that  you  did  not  quite  understand 
him  would  have  worried  the  poet.    Nowa- 

[180] 


SCHOLARSHIP    AND    POETRY 

days  the  confession  only  indicates  to  him 
that  you  do  not  move  in  his  world.  "What 
does  this  line  mean?"  you  ask.  He  may 
explain  to  you,  if  he  is  amiable,  that  it 
means  to  him  the  sensation  he  enjoys 
when  he  hears  a  Beethoven  sonata.  In 
your  surprise  perhaps  you  exclaim,  "I 
never  should  have  imagined  it  meant 
that,"  and  perhaps  he  will  answer,  "That 
is  what  it  means  to  me."  In  some  such 
dialogue  might  be  summarized  not  the 
least  interesting  part  of  the  discussion 
which  has  been  waged  on  our  new  poetry. 
The  protagonists  in  the  movement  have 
dedicated  themselves  to  that  early  condi- 
tion of  poetic  utterance  in  which  the  poet 
makes  his  own  language  and  thereby  be- 
comes his  own  audience  and  his  own  critic, 
each  confined  to  his  own  little  world,  be- 
cause no  one  else  yet  understands  the  lan- 
guage he  speaks. 

[181] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

Yet  if  American  poets  were  to  follow 
the  natural  method  sanctioned  by  the  us- 
age of  the  masters,  they  could  find  ready 
at  hand  much  legend  of  a  high  quality. 
The  Leatherstocking  tales,  to  name  an 
obvious  example,  may  very  well  be  re- 
written from  century  to  century,  so  long 
as  the  romance  of  the  Indian  and  the 
charm  of  Deerslayer's  character  continue 
to  haunt  us.  Much  in  Cooper's  style  and 
in  his  narrative  method  has  ceased  to 
please  readers  accustomed  to  greater 
swiftness  and  greater  precision  of  state- 
ment, but  Leatherstocking  himself  re- 
mains a  living  character  about  whom  later 
generations,  as  well  as  our  own,  may  well 
have  something  to  say.  It  would  need  no 
great  genius  to  turn  such  a  romance  as 
Deer  slayer  or  The  Prairie  to  new  poetic 
account.  Ichabod  Crane  and  Rip  Van 
Winkle  present  us  with  the  same  oppor- 

[182] 


SCHOLARSHIP    AND    POETRY 

tunity  from  Irving's  pages.  Indeed  only 
yesterday,  as  it  seems,  Joseph  Jefferson 
was  acting  his  version  of  Rip,  and  though 
the  American  audience  hardly  realized 
that  the  stage  hero  was  not  altogether  the 
character  Irving  portrayed,  the  second 
version  was  closer  to  the  sentiment  of  our 
times.  There  have  been  other  rewritings 
of  this  story,  and  there  will  be  more.  The 
main  point  is  that  we  should  feel  no  te- 
merity but  rather  an  obligation  to  tell 
again  the  stories,  few  indeed  but  perhaps 
enough  to  start  with,  which  have  taken 
complete  hold  of  the  American  imagina- 
tion. It  is  easier  in  the  United  States  to 
write  about  Rip  Van  Wrinkle  than  to 
write  about  Alexander  Hamilton  or 
Thomas  Jefferson,  for  Rip  Van  Winkle 
is  better  known  to  us.  For  the  same  rea- 
son it  is  easier  to  write  about  Lincoln  than 
about  Washington.    It  would  now  be  quite 

[183] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

impossible  to  write  of  Benjamin  Frank- 
lin with  any  hope  that  the  audience  would 
come  to  the  reading  prepared  to  recognize 
an  old  acquaintance.  But  these  char- 
acters from  fiction  which  I  have  men- 
tioned are  already  part  of  our  national 
language. 

A  more  remarkable  opportunity  per- 
haps which  the  right  poet,  when  he  arrives, 
will  not  neglect,  is  the  cartoon  figure  of 
Uncle  Sam,  which  awaits  only  the  happy 
assistance  of  genius  to  pass  from  his  sphere 
of  dim  but  wide  popularity  into  the  world 
of  national  art.  Uncle  Sam  is  perhaps 
more  real  now  to  the  majority  of  Ameri- 
can children  than  Lincoln  himself.  His 
features  are  obviously  the  product  of  our 
life  and  our  climate ;  the  character  that  he 
almost  has  is  strikingly  akin  to  ours.  If 
we  only  knew  his  family  history — who  are 
his  relatives,  how  he  earns  his  living,  what 

[184] 


SCHOLARSHIP    AND    POETRY 

his  voice  sounds  like  when  he  speaks !  The 
poet  who  will  tell  us  this  will  do  for  Uncle 
Sam  what  Cinderella's  godmother  did  for 
the  pumpkin  and  the  lizards — though  the 
cartoon  figure  is  much  nearer  to  the  thres- 
hold of  life  than  was  the  raw  material  of 
the  godmother's  magic. 

I  take  it  as  a  happy  augury  for  our  lit- 
erature that  many  writers  to-day,  even 
though  theoretically  committed  to  new 
and  revolutionary  methods,  are  instinc- 
tively turning  to  the  material  of  our  past 
for  their  subjects.  To  be  sure,  they  usu- 
ally try  to  revive  some  historical  episode, 
forgetting  perhaps  that  America  is  not 
very  familiar  with  its  own  history,  and  that 
such  episodes  of  antiquity  as  the  opening 
of  Japan  by  Admiral  Perry  will  hardly  be 
recognized  by  the  majority  of  American 
readers.  Yet  the  tendency  to  use  authen- 
tic material  as  poetic  language  is  itself 

[185] 


THE    KINDS    OF    POETRY 

sound,  and  when  more  of  our  poets  have 
cultivated  this  kind  of  scholarship,  an 
American  poetry  can  begin. 


THE  END 


[1861 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 

Los  Angeles 
This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below. 


??r'n  mime 

198f 


to  WAR  l  g  1985 

MAR  221985 


315 


3  1158  00651  9705 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL 


LIBRARY  FACILITY 


AA    000  410  833    8 


